MARVEL Cosmic Invasion, Horses, Majesty

you Hello gamers and non-gamers. Welcome back to the noclip crewcast. This is episode 256. You may have noticed, long-time listeners, this is not a Game of the Year episode, despite the fact that last week's episode was our last normal one. We pranked ya! Actually, it's a lot sadder than that. Danny posted a whole update on Noclip 2. You can read about it if you go on the Discord, but you can hear about it. He'll explain his situation. He had an emergency back home.

A family member has fallen ill, so he's got to go deal with all of that and be the family man for a little while. So he's preoccupied at the moment. That's why he's not on the pod this week either. Everything's going to go, you know, the way that it goes. Life is as it is, but... He is in our thoughts and we're thinking about his family and everything while he's over there back home. So I hope he stays in your thoughts as well and you're having a good...

holiday season. It's the time. It's the most wonderful time of the year, except for everything negative I just said. Jeremy, bring me back to the joy town. Make this lighter. Bring me back. Okay, it's been snowing. I saw snow accumulation for the first time in so many years, and it's been absolutely magical. Every time I look outside, I'm filled with holiday joy. And I don't know, there's something about...

playing playing video games when there's snow outside that I feel like it's it's a real peanut butter and jelly situation. You know what I mean? Like it's like it's true. Going outside is too cold. It's too cold to go outside. I have to play video games. I'm legally obligated and morally obligated to play video games. I want to stop, Mom. I just can't. It's so cold. The cops are going to arrest me. Frank Hiley, have you ever been arrested for anything cool?

I've been pulled over for having a good brake light out, but I don't think I've ever gotten a ticket. So, again, every time I say stuff like that, I feel like I'm jinxing myself. Sorry, I should have asked you. No, it's fine. I don't care. The biggest fear is if I do any criminal act in Japan, then I'm never ever allowed back. So that's when I'm on my best behavior. Right, and you've got to be extra careful in Japan. Yeah, I don't care here. Kick me out. America, great.

Oh, no. I've been extradited to Japan. Oh, really? Oh, man. I think the only time I ever got stopped by the police was I was with a friend in high school and we saw a cop sitting there watching the crosswalk and the light. And it's like the littlest. We're talking like. 15 foot crosswalk. Like it's nothing. The light was red and.

Our third friend who was with us was like, don't cross. There's a cop there. And I was like, what's he going to do? Arrest me really loudly. I shouldn't have said that. Obviously, I go across the street and he pulls he's got the lights going. He stops us. He's like, hey, you know, that crosswalk, blah, blah, blah. Where are your parents? You have you have one hundred dollars to pay.

And I'm like, no, it's just stupid. Was he trying to extort you? Yeah, he was trying to intimidate us. You could pay me now and we could just forget about this. You give me $100 cash and I'm not going to arrest you. I switch off this body cam, you hand me a Benjamin.

Whatever $100 bill is in Canada. Also Benjamin's. No, I actually don't know who's on the Canadian $100 bill. I should know that. I've never seen them, so I guess why would I know that? It's probably some monarch that isn't from Canada. Or like a scientist who cured a disease or something. That's all of our money is like scientists, activists, and yeah, monarchs. We just got Ben Franklin. Ben. What do you ever do? We got Jefferson. What's Jefferson on?

Uh, the five, right? The five? And the nickel? I don't know. Who's on the penny? Lincoln? Lincoln's on the penny. But they just retired his ass. No more fucking pennies. Take that, Abraham. Dumbass. Hey, man, you know, he's like one of the only guys who did something good on the way. Yeah, I take it back. Actually, he was a little chill for a little bit there. You know who would be on all of no clips money, though, if we had our own currency?

Our battle pass holders. That's right. Cause they fund our endeavors. They give us the currency so we can spend the currency to create more currency. They're kind of, they're kind of our pimps, including.

Our great list here. I'm going to try to do it all in one breath. Let's see how far I can get. Lil Toast, Cory, Love Preet, Yut. Tiny Tao, Dwayne the Rock Lobster, Anthony Thomas, Nico Positieri, It's Amir Ferrario, Senator Armstrong, Reed Dredge, Harry Flanagan, Joosh, Arno, Matt Pearson, James Brown, Mark Rojas, Quote, Tucker Morgan, David McGarry, Goddison, Sven Hooster, Pez, John Akers, you went Nate, Tim Rock. Oh, I almost made it. I almost made it. I got like five more, six more.

George Sarkotis, Jacob Godserve, Entheogen, James Med, Tohir Tilyev, and Rycin. I apologize. I had to take a breath for you lovely people, but I didn't want to pass out on the podcast. That hurt my head. That sounded painful. You know what's crazy is Lincoln's on the five, but I use cash money so infrequently that I just forgot. I can't remember the last time I paid for anything in cash. Yeah, I feel like cash was for suckers.

Except for all the people who use cash, they'll tell you the other way. I might just be the brokest bitch ever. But you're like, oh, who's on the $5 bill? I don't know, man. That's kind of out of my pay grade. Do you guys have tap yet? Do you have to, like, tap to pay? Can you do that yet in America? Yeah, you can. I used to tab, like, the soda, and I was like, yeah, we got rid of that in the 80s. You guys could tab down there yet? Yeah, do you guys have that yet? Have they invented that?

I know there was a brief period, maybe like 10, 11 years ago when I was in the States, I couldn't pay for anything tapping my card. And that's like the only way you pay for stuff up here. Nobody, if you have to put your pin in, you feel like you're in the paleolithic era. It's like a dinosaur. I can't believe that it was so uncommon for you guys that long ago, but at least you have it now. So that's good. I...

I didn't know. This is embarrassing. I didn't know that when people said, oh, you can like, you know, tap if you want. I didn't know what they meant. And I just never asked. And I never was. I was just a fundamentally incurious person. And I was like, oh, that must be like Apple Pay or something.

And that was the start of it, I think. Right. Was banks had to sort of catch on after. But I mean, you could tap your card for probably half of a decade before I before I personally opted to figure out what that meant.

That's fair. I just keep saying you tap and you're like, that's OK. Can we have dinner first at least? I don't think you're going to dab me up. They're like, yeah, you can tap. Dab me up and then you can pay. I'm like, I'm good, man. I don't need to dab me up. Germs. I'm not into that.

We've got a lot of video games we're going to talk about this week. Well, actually, not that many video games. A lot of questions. A lot of emails. So thank you so much for sending those in. I'm excited to talk about those. But we do have some video games. Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Jeremy's gone back in time to check out Majesty. He's reliving his childhood.

I'm going to talk about the Samogo Legacy Collection, a great collection of classic games from one of my favorite developers, as of recent anyway. I'm going to have a quick shout out, just a quick little brief talk about Scrabdackle, this new game. Sounds like I just made up a pill you have to.

buy over the counter or behind the counter, rather, if you want to get in the black market pill industry. But we're also going to talk about the video game of our time. Everyone's talking about it because you can't play it if you only buy games on Steam.

Horses. That's what we're going to talk about. Not the animal. And it turns out actually horses doesn't feature any horses in reality. Yeah, that's fair. Do we start with horses? We have to start with horses. It is the conversation of our time. Everyone's talking about it. Let's just get it out of the way, too. I feel like everyone's going to talk about it, so we might as well just get in and say the same things everyone else is going to say, but differently.

I think this would be an interesting start. Frank, what have you heard about this horses game? I looked into it and I think I saw what the twist was, but I still want to know how fucked up it is. Is it like a Serbian film, the video game? Is it worth checking out? To me, I'm like, oh, this sounds cool. Yeah, should I play this? But there's no trophies. It's not on PlayStation.

If you get it on GOG, there's achievements. Okay, I meant to see. It's only five bucks, so it's cheap. These are all pluses for me. And there's faux controversy around it. Or maybe genuine controversy. It's pretty faux. It's pretty faux. Yeah, so I don't know. So it's like there's some points of interest in here. Okay, good. I'm glad that you're excited about it a little bit. Yeah, it's basically just like a, you know.

I would say it's a challenging and at times, you know, kind of like disturbing and dark sort of arthouse horror. Game that just is it's like no more offensive than a hundred movies that I've seen that are a million times worse. It's very odd. Like specifically dark movies like there are mainstream horror movies that I.

get a little bit or like at the same level of of dark, weird, messed up visuals that this this game employs. I feel like that's not unfair, especially because a lot of the dark stuff is kind of like implied and happens off screen.

Yeah, so this game was, this game Horses. The developer, Jesse, you're familiar. What have they? Yes, Santa Ragione, I believe is how you say it. The Italian team, I'm pretty sure. They developed Saturnalia, which is like a really interesting horror escape game. Takes place in...

a small town. I really enjoyed that. I thought it was pretty cool. And then my wife played Mediterranean Inferno, their last game. It's like a narrative adventure about a bunch of, it's like a coming of age narrative adventure that takes place around the start of COVID. So it's like a bunch of lockdown remote relationship stuff, which I thought was pretty interesting. It was fun to watch her play it. She liked it so much. She beat it twice. And I don't think she's ever done anything twice.

Like in terms of media and stuff, she wakes up twice. She does a lot of things twice, but not not play video games twice. Yeah, but Santa Ragione does a lot of weird, interesting indie stuff. They like jump around different genres. So it was cool to see them do. Like they normally do very bright, colorful, sort of art house-y video games, like the sort of stuff that people who are, you know.

not inclined to playing that sort of thing. We'll play it and go, wow, this is what new games are. What the frick? Um, so it was, it was interesting to see them announce horses, a game that if you watch the trailer looks like disgusting. complimentary i suppose uh yeah jeremy could you could you talk a little bit about horses sort of explain to uh to the audience what you're doing what is this game exactly

Yeah, it's you're basically just like a kid who's helping out on a farm. It's sort of the is sort of the conceit here. And the farm has horses, but all the horses are just like naked people with horse masks on. And and it uses this. It's sort of like a it's like a it's like a bottle parable. It's like this very narrow perspective on one sort of environment, one situation. And it teases out this like horse and human dynamic.

in to basically just like explore themes of dehumanization and otherization and exploitation and all of these kind of different, you know, dark themes. Different Asians. Any word with an Asian at the end. Any Asian you can think of. And yeah, so the controversy around this game was that it was slated to come out on every digital platform and then it was banned from Steam and then Epic took it. Epic also banned it at the last minute.

So I bought it on GOG. But I mean, you know, for an independent developer. Also on itch.io. Yeah, it's also on itch. It was supposed to come. It did. So this was the weirdest part is it came out on Humble. And then I think it. was delisted on Humble for a couple of hours the day it came out, and then it was relisted by Humble.

That's okay. You know what happened? They heard it was bad. They took it down and then they were just like, all right, just someone play it. Someone in the office play it. Because it was three hours later too. So you're totally right. I think someone played it and they were like, oh shit. The longest you could possibly spend with that game is three hours. And then they were like, I mean, that was like fucking kind of gross. Yeah.

I don't know. But anyway, so, yeah, it's been sort of a big deal in the discourse, in the zeitgeist, because this is a small, independent, you know, like art, art game developer. And Steam is, you know, obviously.

If you make... if you make like ragu pasta sauce and they stop stocking it in like walmart and every grocery store it's like sure yeah theoretically you could sell your ragu at the fucking every corner store in the world but it's you know you're gonna take a hit now transpose that onto like a small art house develop

and all of a sudden it's like you're losing out on basically like I don't know the percentage of PC games sales that happen on Steam but I imagine like 90 it's like it has to be a shocking majority and

Because of that, like, you know, a lot of discovery happens on Steam essentially. So I think people who were already excited about this game, who played the developers previous games, they will seek it out. Yes. And that is sort of the like the counter argument I've heard from a lot of sort of like.

I don't know. What's a nice way of saying corporate bootlicker? Is there like a euphemism for that? I've seen a lot of people being like, well, if you want this game, you can go on down to GOG and you can buy it. And it's like, yes, that is true. But I think that, you know.

The amount of people who will like organically discover this drops exponentially, excluding the people who are aware of it because of the controversy, which is sort of like a different conversation. It's not like Steam was like, let's ban this game. All right, long, long play. Let's ban this game. And then every.

and we'll hear about it and go play it. It's secretly a marketing tactic. I want to get to the banning stuff in a second because we got an email here that I want to include in this so we're not saving its answer too late. But I just wanted to quickly talk about the...

Parts of the game that I think are at least interesting or noteworthy to me. Visually, it's all black and white. So it has this like it's in first person. So it's sort of just walking around and performing these tasks and takes place over about 14 days. Right. Something that I thought was kind of interesting, I don't know, visually is like there's intercut of live action footage throughout the game. Usually when you're performing a task.

But sometimes like it'll just overlay what you're doing or it'll be like a different camera shot. They do interesting things visually. I think that's also something that they did in Saturnalia as well. Just like weird camera angle stuff and like rendered a texture on a part of the screen. It's like a cool visual.

style. So there's there's interesting stuff going on here visually. I don't know necessarily if I thought the game itself really stuck the landing on what it was trying to say. There's like parts of it that I think resonated, especially the like the horse stuff and like the work. Ethic part of it of like who is allowed to be denigrated and like what do we allow that?

that's that relationship to be between people who are forced to do things and people who aren't, um, who's allowed to be in control. Obviously I think leads to the reaction to the game and the way that it's been removed and sort of. blocked on, on these platforms. It's like the game is sort of saying the thing that happened to it is a problem. And, but like, it's, I don't know, it rides the line on a lot of commentary and I don't know if it necessarily.

hits the mark on everything it's trying to say. Like it really briefly talks about religion at a point in a way that feels sort of like you got to include it because we're talking about control. And I'm like, OK, let's go somewhere with it.

That's the interesting thing is I played... more than i mean it's a two and a half hour game i played more than half of it i've not completed it uh i i don't super resonate with it i i think it's fine like i don't i don't love it or hate it i think it's it seems like good like i think it's interesting but it maybe not my cup of tea um

But I think it's important that like that's sort of the core of this issue when we talk about like censorship stuff with games is like you don't have to like a game to want it to not be.

fucking banned from the storefront you know what i mean like that i i if if your metric for what should be banned is do i personally like it i think you should really like reevaluate like what the purpose of banning things is um do you hate authoritarian authoritarianism or you just don't like it when it's not someone you agree with maybe you know um reflect the initial sort of like

What I heard initially was that an early build of this game had been sent to Steam for approval and basically had a scene where a child, a young girl, was riding on the shoulders of a naked horse person. Yeah. Have you gotten to that bit yet? What'd you say? Did you get to that bit in the game yet? Yeah, where it's like an adult woman, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So they obviously changed that. So that's not in the game anymore. But I guess what I had heard is that and again, this is the problem is that there's not transparency around these like delistings is that these things happen and people are like, all right, so what policy specifically did this violate?

so that other people can avoid it and there was kind of no like you know this is this is the moment this is when it happened and if you do that once even in an early build will like delist you forever there was no sort of like

come to Jesus moment where everyone understood and the air was cleared. And that's kind of the issue here is basically all I heard is that that happened. And then they removed that from the game and kind of got no. update from valve and then they like made the final game without that in it and it still got delisted um and when you compare it to like i mean there's some crazy shit on steam there's like yeah there's like five sex with hitler games

There's a lot of like, I need to play the first two. How am I supposed to catch up? Yeah, no, you can't jump in at three. It's like you can't just watch Empire Strikes Back. That makes sense. It is a bit like Star Wars. Sex with Hitler. Yeah. It's of a similar caliber, but, um, but yeah, no, it's just, I mean, that's the problem is that it's like, sure. Steam has the right to list and D list games as they please. They are a.

privately owned company that, you know, it's like you don't have to do anything as you're not compelled to list a game just because it exists or whatever. But the problem is, is that when there are sort of like these.

byzantine back channel rules and processes for determining what is you know listable and non-listable uh it becomes just like weird arbitrary censorship and i think that a really interesting point of distinction in this is that i think that like sexuality and violence in art are these things where it seems like and this is a very american perspective but i do feel like this is sort of like largely true in global culture to some extent that i think violence and sexuality when they are

leveraged towards or focused on pleasure or gratification always seems to be more okay for some reason yeah like 100% I have seen games where someone's like head is like ripped off and they're like spine comes out and shit or like, you know, someone's balls exploded in an x-ray like these things operated a giant.

plane full of rockets and shot a bunch of dots on a map like how many games is that just a perfectly acceptable thing to do yeah and and to be very clear i'm not saying those things should be censored i'm saying that like no the other side of the coin is if you do something where it's like you know, horrible, grotesque.

gore but it's not meant to be titillating but it's not yeah but it's not like fun stimulating gore it's like look how disgusting this is gore or you know conversely or like you know the sort of sexuality has the same dynamic where it's like if it's a game where

you know you're having sex with an anime girl or whatever there's a ton of jiggle physics it's like that is I don't think that should be banned either that's fine to have like pornographic materials if you're an adult and you can if you're of the legal age to buy that and wherever the fuck you live that's fine but when sexuality is explored in a way that is like subversive or challenging or sort of evoking larger artistic ideas but but the ideas that it's exploring are not just like doesn't it

you know, make you, doesn't this make you so horny to see? Are you horny, baby? Yeah. If Austin Powers plays your game, yeah, and he's getting excited, then it's okay. Everyone at Valve gathers around while Austin Powers plays the games, they're like, does he look rain?

does this make him randy is his mojo activated yeah let's check the mojo beater um but uh but i just think that's like an interesting sort of metric for like sexuality and violence of these things that are either censorable or allowable depending on like is this Is this challenging you or is this like pleasing you? You know what I mean? Is this is this frictional sexuality or is this like.

you know, conducive to sexuality as a form of pleasure. I mean, you know what they say, it seems today that all we see is violence in movies and sex on TV. It's the family guy metric. Where are the good old-fashioned values of what you used to go on? You're just reading the rules from Steam censorship. Yeah, gay... sent it to me. I did want to read this email from Catherine because I think we're sort of getting into the echoes of this conversation.

So Catherine sent in an email. Thank you so much. It says, hey, Noclip crew, I wanted to ask your thoughts on Steam and then Epic and then Humble, banning the narrative game horses from their platform. The developers are still able to sell on GOG and Itch at the time of writing. And could sell on their own site like some adult games have been forced to do lately, but they're missing most on the market. Like you were saying earlier, Jeremy.

What are your feelings about how Steam's approval of a game can decide if it lives or dies on PC, especially with the prominence of the deck and upcoming Steam machine? The developer, Santa Ragione, expects to close if sales aren't strong enough for horses, and with most PC... players reluctant to buy off of Steam, people defaulting to it over checking itch. It seems that they'll have to. And all over again, that seems like a Yorgos Lanthimos film. I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't say it's...

It didn't remind me of any Yorgos film in particular, really. It's sort of like in that ballpark, though. Yeah, it's in the same universe for sure. Unsettling, surreal, horror adjacent. The closest you can get to it in a video game while being able to sell it on at least one platform. Yeah, I mean, again, it's not that...

It's not that Steam has this obligation as a private company to list everything that comes their way. That is obviously not the case that anyone is making. I think that the obviously this email is not making that case either. I'm just sort of like throwing that out there as a preface. I think that the.

The point that I think is worth attention and the reason people are in such a like so worked up about this is what the email alludes to, which is that like Steam has this this sort of huge monopoly over. the sales of PC games. And that is only sort of like growing and becoming stronger as far as I can tell. And like you said, with like the deck and the steam machine and all these things, it's like.

PC gaming is so firmly in the grip of Steam and Valve that though they do not have a financial or business obligation to list everything, I think that it is... I feel like there's a need if they care about video games as a medium to confront the fact that like there is that whether or not they like it, whether or not they have a responsibility to, I feel like they should think about the fact that like.

if they delist a game, they are deciding what games get to live and die in some sense. You know what I mean? Like, it's... I don't know. It's weird because it's like I don't think we should like the government shouldn't be like, all right, Steam, you have to like play every porn game and make sure it's like not too sexy. Do the Austin Powers test. But I do think that like.

Like, there's so much fucking money that comes in through this. It's 30% of every sale on Steam, which is an insane amount. Unless you make a bajillion dollars, in which case it's lowered, which I think is very funny. Right, of course. It goes down after you hit like a million dollars. And when I say it's an insane amount of money, I'm not saying, this isn't me making the point.

of like, oh, 30 percent is too much, though I do feel that in some cases. But that's a totally separate point. What I'm saying is the amount of money that's coming in is is a lot of it's a lot of fucking money. I don't think it would be unreasonable when there are sort of like. edge cases like this which I don't even feel like it really like I have no transparency into how often they delist or ban games I'm sure it's more than I think but like I feel like

A lot of them are probably a little more black and white than this. A lot of them are probably more like insert horrible act here simulator. And it's like, well, we can't can't have that because that's like you're just simulating that for no artistic effect. But but when it comes to games. like this and like um god i can't remember what was the game the mortuary game not mortuary assistant but it was the other delisted game

like a few, it was one, nevermind. I'll have to look it up before the end of the episode. One of the games that was like delisted from steam and the whole like itch payment processor, uh, fiasco vile exhumed. Yes. Yes. That was the one. Um, I think that like, There are sufficiently few edge cases where it's like, oh, maybe this is art or maybe it's like exploitative that like couldn't they just give me like I would just like play all those games and then like write a book report to them.

And they just have like two of me who are like, yeah, they pay like a few thousand dollars to play all your freak games. Figure it out. Give me like 10K a year and I'll just be like, you know, like middle of the night. Gabe calls me and he's like, hey, man, we got like another.

Someone's fucking the horse people. Is that OK? And I'm like, I don't know. Let me give me a couple hours and I'll say I brew my coffee and I play the horse people game and then I just write them a little book report. I don't know. I'm being overly simplistic because it's kind of funny, but like.

I am serious. That is sort of what happens though, right? Like once this situation comes up, somebody has to review the content in some regard. Like once they put in their report and they noticed this aspect of the game, whether it was in a trailer or something, I assume there has to be some manual review.

At some point, there is a manual review, but I wonder if like it seems it seems hard for me to believe that someone played the initial build, saw a kid was in it and was like, that's fucked up, which. Yeah, that's your personal opinion. I mean, I also like, you know, I watched like a Cassavetes movie the other day that had like a naked child in it. And it's like, that's not sexual. That's like, it's weird to assume that every time a child is around like.

But there's like fucking if you're like a parent, you like. bathe your child on the beach there was a baby running around naked there was a naked baby running around and i wasn't like somebody call the police this baby is breaking the law like it's a fucking baby so like and the thing about that scene by the way i don't think the Kid was supposed to be nude.

No, no, the child was clothed, right? It's just that all of the horse people are naked because they're like horses. Which makes it uncomfortable. The scene in the game, this isn't particularly spoilery, but spoilery, spoilery, I'm going to start saying that, is the...

placed her with an adult woman who now like comes and visits the farm and rides on the horses around and there are these like weird slapstick sequences in the game where you ride a horse around and it plays like vaudeville yeah yeah it's like vaudeville like rubber hose cartoon music it's like

and you're like riding this tortured man around i'm gonna collect all the carrots it is because there is sexual content in this game but that is not part of it you know what i mean um and i think that scene is worse because they replaced

the character with an adult woman. I think the point that's being made in that moment works better when it's like, this is the juvenile thoughts of a child. This is what they're being instilled with. And then they're repeating it to you literally. It's like, this is what the next generation is going to say in this world.

It doesn't work as well if it's just like an adult woman and this is what she thinks. Like, OK, sure. Agreed. I get that. Because like when you're a kid, you know, it's like the fucking it's like the the ones who left Omelas or whatever, where if you've never read this, it's Ursula K. Le Guin.

i think the short story but it's like this society where there's like what everything is paradise and everything is perfect utopia but there's like one sort of like whipping boy figure there's like a child who uh has to like receive all of the hatred and ire of everyone And it's like only by having this one person who lives the shittiest life imaginable can everyone else live in paradise. It's like.

I it's an interesting theme because the point of the story is that like once you're old enough, they tell you about the Oma lost child. And it's like some people hear that and they're like, well, this is way too fucked up. I have to like leave. paradise behind because it's run on suffering. But most people are just like.

They grow up with it and then they're shown it and they're like, oh, yeah, that's just like that. We just have like the Omelas kid who everyone fucking spits on and whatever. And I think that that's an interesting theme to explore that this game could have explored by having a kid in it is like if you're if you're a kid and the adults around you are just normalized.

atrocities you know like if you're if you were like nine years old when 9-11 happened they're like yeah we gotta go kill those people over there because they're bad people they hate the way we live you're like nine years old you're not like wait a minute i don't know if that's like a long-term things to consider about that or like so you're just like yeah i'm nine i feel like that's that's what you're supposed to america yeah i get what you're saying for sure and and that is like

To the point of all the people defending this game as art. And again, I don't even particularly like this game. I just think it's important to discuss this. That is a like... that scene having a kid in it a is totally non-sexual and b is a sort of like you can't explore that theme in the same way without a child in that scene and so it's not that like it's not that i'm defending the right to do whatever the fuck you want in a piece of art like

I don't this isn't some sort of like weird abstraction of a point. It's that like this specific instance by changing the material of this artistic expression changes the message and limits the sort of like. limits the, the type of message that is able to be explored through a piece of art. And I think that's, I think that's fucking bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think just, yeah, even past the, the economic considerations of, of banning video games and defining.

the small shape that video games can fit within. Yeah, the fact that the censorship isn't just like, oh, you can't sell your game for five bucks on Steam. It's like, no, if you want to even try to, you have to change the content of it.

And now all the reporting that comes out about it is like everyone's playing telephone, repeating the wrong information. It's the same thing that happened with the collective shout situation we talked about months ago of like everyone heard one talking point and repeated it, but incorrectly over and over again until we were all.

assuming the thing that we heard was the truth. When it turned out, because you looked into it, Jeremy, after we had that big conversation about it on the pod, that like, oh, actually, the content of the game they were trying to get banned was not some egregious simulation of sexual assault. It was just...

It was just text. It was just it was just like it was basically like a soft core porn video game. People were like, oh, this is like a sexual assault simulator and stuff. And it's like it definitely had weird themes of of coercion.

but it was played in the most like softcore porn way imaginable where it was like hey I'm gonna like I'm gonna tell someone something about you if you don't have sex with me they're like I guess we'll have to have sex then like it was like that level of fucking you know what I mean it's like

I guess that's kind of depraved, but everyone was talking about it where it's like, this is a game where you do the most horrible things. It's like Manhunt on the Wii and you do all the motion movements. It's Manhunt for sex. Yeah. And it wasn't that. And it's the same thing here. I feel like people...

kid and and, you know, fetish act in some way. And that sort of got molded into being it's actually it's this messed up thing and it's the truth. And it's it must be true because I heard about it when that's not what happened. It brings up an interesting point as well about. The way that you can sort of disingenuously frame anything to sound way worse than it is where it's like, I saw people, you know, a content warning. I'm about to say like a few.

words that are bad but like I saw people talking about horses and they're like should we really be going to bat for a game that has like you know, sexual assault and like necrophilia and like this and gore and dismemberment and blah, blah, blah. And it's like. All I could picture was someone.

talking about like oh yeah that horse game that came out this year I think we should ban it you know I actually think it's evil because like it's it's instilling you know negative behavior in children it's like it's teaching them the wrong way of living and then they're being like oh I'm actually talking about Uma Musume because like

like i think you can it encourages gambling uh yeah like you can disingenuously for you could talk about like uh any literally like any r-rated movie ever and be like is it really appropriate for it to like rip a woman in half and it's like I mean, that's just like Godzilla just does that because it's Godzilla. So I think you could make things sound way worse because it's like, you know, I don't know. What should we just like not make art that has like.

violence in it and then we live in a world where it's like when real violence happens it's so shocking because it's like oh no like i've never even thought of death as a possibility um it's like art like exists to explore shit that like shouldn't be explored in real life you know what i mean like i i don't even like gore in movies like i like horror movies but i i don't even particularly like i'm i

personally feel very like sensitive to gore i watch gory movies like you know i watched like weapons recently and uh it has some crazy gore in it and i was like well that's fucking genuinely shocking um but it's like i don't know it's like

It's just it's supposed to be shocking. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to see I don't want to see a woman's head explode in real life. But like when it's in a movie, it's done in a way where it's it's basically your friend being like, dude, can you imagine if this happened? And it's like, I.

Yeah, that is crazy. I can't imagine that. That sounds horrific. I don't want to think about that in my brain or see it on the screen. Doesn't mean that you want a band, though. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Or that it can't, you know, it can be used to.

explore ideas that I think are like worth defending, I guess, is my bottom line here. So even if you don't like horses, you should not want it to be banned. That's right. Don't ban horses. Don't do it. Yeah. So real life horses. Yeah. The video game is. It's available on GOG and itch still if you want to play horses, if you want to check it out.

Jeremy and I don't sound super enthused about it, but that doesn't mean that we want it banned. If you like weird art horror, you should play it. You'll probably you'll get something out of it. I thought it was visually interesting. And like there are bits of it that were so grotesque that they mess with me. But like I also got I was more uncomfortable.

like no I'm not a human than I was playing this by a long mile and not because I wasn't expect like I was expecting this to be uncomfortable in the same way that I was expecting no I'm not a human to be uncomfortable this was much less

No, I'm not a human was, at least for me personally. It's definitely. I thought this was way more distressing personally. See, we have we have different feelings about I have I have unprocessed COVID trauma. That's what it is. That's why I know I'm not a human. I have unprocessed other trauma. Yeah. Well, there you go. You also work.

on a farm ranch with a bunch of human horses. I was one of the horse people. I've never talked about it until now. They finally let me out. Yeah, that's horses. I think we've said our bit on it. I think it's bad that this happened and it's probably not great for the medium that we've had two stories this year of games.

being banned from the biggest platform and what that means for content regulation moving forward. I don't know. We'll see. I wish Danny was here to give us the other side of all of this. I don't think he would. I don't think he would push back. You don't think he would be like, let's ban the video game.

No, I think Danny would, you know, he would do his journalistic duty by represent. He'd be like, well, listen, we got to consider these positions. But I think Danny is firmly anti censorship on this ship. He always has been. Yeah, for sure.

We'll ask him about it when he gets back. I'm sure he'll be excited to talk about this. Yeah, that's horses. Like I said, check it out. GOG itch. Maybe they'll have their own website up. I mean, maybe it'll still be on GOG and itch. Who knows? Who knows? This story has been changing so much this week, but this podcast will be up tomorrow. So if it changes that fast. that sucks. Yeah, check it out. Let's move to literally anything else. Frank, Marvel Cosmic Invasion. After talking about...

people being exploited let's talk about heroes saving the day artists being screwed like Todd McFarlane which is why him Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane was going down the elevator someone at Marvel said you guys won't be successful and that

That filled Tom McFarlane with spite of 100 years. And he said that Spawn will keep going until he dies. And he was right. Spiteful against Marvel. Yeah, the image story. Check out the documentary streaming on Amazon. They're banning Spawn from being sold at your local comic. I just want to interject for one second to say that's literally MF Doom's backstory as well. Really? It's spite towards the music industry. That's so sick.

Yeah, I guess coming into this, I'm not a huge Marvel fan, but I like comic books. But the real reason I'm stoked on Marvel Cosmic Invasion is it's Tribute Games. Oh, woo! This is my... You know, no, like not that. I don't know the geography of Canada, but Montreal, Quebec, far right side, the East Coast. They're not far right yet. No, no. But yeah, the Quebecers tribute games.

One of my favorite developers, for me, the first game that really hooked me was Mercenary Kings like a decade ago. Yeah, Mercenary Kings is awesome. Scott Pilgrim, and then they even recently did TMNT Shredder's Revenge. They've had a long history of working with like Pixel. artists like Paul Robertson, Mariel Cartwright. They've always worked with really cool people.

Great composers, too. Their music's always great. They work with T. Lopes a bunch, which is so good. And the last few years, they've lucked into just getting... They've gotten great properties to work with, so they did TMNT Shredders Revenge, which was super fun. And now I don't know if this is their biggest budget game yet, but Marvel cosmic invasion, I think it has like 13 or 15 characters.

and with each character that's so much like animation voice work everything so this is like a big um there's only like what like a dozen levels but in terms of just like um I don't know. This game packs a bunch. I don't know. Monoconstant Invasion is a new...

It's a new beat-em-up from Tribute Games. It is on Game Pass. I did not know. I, like, requested a code. Like, I really want to play this. The guy's like, sure. And I was like, oh, wait, it's free on Game... Okay. But I'm playing it on PS5. It is cross-play. Yeah, it's a standard beat-em-up, but what makes this game really unique and special is the folks at Tribute Games and everyone involved are such hardcore fans of just like...

It's like 2D pixel art as like an art form, as a, as a body of work. There's specific like moves and animations. That's like, Oh, they're straight up just doing the Marvel versus Capcom to Iron Man special. Like, Oh, that's sick. He does the big Supreme Canon or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Like all of the.

all of the moves are literal callbacks to like the old, like even, uh, Konami's X-Men arcade game, like beat them up. It's like this game is just a massive love letter. It's like every 2d Capcom and Marvel beat them. Like, so like, you know, like we, like we've had a conversation like this year. Jesse was radicalized by like Absalom was the beat-em-up that finally clicked for me.

Like as a kid going to Chuck E. Cheese and playing X-Men Arcade was like my exposure to that. So it's been incredible to play this. And what I like about Marvel Cosmic Invasion is like you can start single player. You can open up your party. And within minutes, it feels like random people will jump in. and then your lobby is full and you have so many characters on screen and it's just chaos but I like that the thing that also makes this beat'em up unique is uh

When you pick your characters, you pick two characters at a time. In middle of combat, you can swap out your characters. You can even do like Marvel's Capcom, like tag team assists and stuff and like juggle characters and stuff. So yeah, Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a really satisfying medium up to play.

it's got it fun progression again like scott pilgrim you can level up every single individual character so it rewards like replayability every level has like different challenges use iron man and kill 15 enemies with your special whatever you know so um Yeah, and there's, like, hidden collectibles. You can unlock art, things like that. So, yeah, Marvel Cosmic Invasion. I was stoked we got to cover it because originally, like...

This game would have been cropped out of our game of the year discussion. I don't think it's necessarily a game of the year, but for me, a big 2D beat-em-up fan, like, oh, this is awesome. Oh, my God, this is so cool. And, yeah, so I really like this game. So where does this sit on the beat-em-up spectrum? Because I talked about how I...

do not like this genre. And Absalom was the first one that really made it click for me. Is this closer to Streets of Rage? Or is this closer to maybe like a Turtles in Time? Or like I played Shredder's Revenge and I thought that was actually really good. Is this closer to that?

yeah it's uh like it's it's it feels it's weird it feels like it's like the capcom beat-em-ups where it's just standard like push through the levels like you're not um let me see like street i'm trying to recall like street straight is ford I don't know. I'm so sworn by the pixel art as opposed to the... I feel like Streets of Rage had the more illustrative modern flash look. I know that's not the right word. No, I don't know what you mean.

Yeah, I don't know. It's just, I feel like levels are only like 10 minutes long. There's not like different routes in terms of like during a stage. Like Final Fight 3 on Super Nintendo, you could like punch a wall and then you go through a different, which was like, God, oh my God, we haven't done that in a while.

yeah it's it's pretty standard there's not like you're not getting loot or anything like that you just you'll get xp at the end of a thing and level up but um playing this to me like it does scratch that final fight itch i'm trying to think again x-men uh konami i think a lot of is what it feels like to play strutters

Revenge is probably identical in terms of how that plays and feels because it's the same team. I only went through Shadows Revenge like maybe like once or twice. I didn't replay it a ton of times whereas with this I'm kind of hooked on getting all the achievements so I'm going back to the levels a lot.

Yeah, and then I feel like Scott Pilgrim felt a lot slower. I know Scott Pilgrim was all about the big boss battles and all the gimmicks in each level, but I feel like the stage to stage in Scott Pilgrim was kind of slow. Oh, the individual enemy fights in Scott Pilgrim versus the world was like, it took like 20 punches to kill.

anybody and they dropped all their loonies and quarters and toonies come on yeah it like i'm sure that got better as you leveled up but i feel like this is like way more fast-paced and definitely if you are doing the multiplayer stuff um Yeah, if you're playing single player, it's kind of fun, though, because you can like parry. So if you hit circle, you can block or you can parry. And so like, oh, there's a little there's like an advanced.

I don't know. It sounds like there's fighting game strats. And again, a lot of it really does feel like throwbacks, like the 2d beat him, like fighting, like actual Marvel's Capcom stuff, which is, um,

yeah surprising amount of depth and again a lot of it is tied to achievements like i got an achievement yesterday that's like oh deflect 50 times using captain america's shield so it was fun to just sit there and spam the button um but yeah it it it scratches it well for me um i know eventually like i mean maybe within a week or

until I'll be done with the game and move on. But yeah, for now, it's again, it's literally perfect as an arcade game because I'll sit on my PS5 thinking like, what do I want to play? So many games feel like you need like a half hour to like genuinely like.

get something out of it here you can start playing it yeah you can boot it up do a level for 10 minutes like oh that was good should I keep going or put it down so um but yeah literally playing it feels like playing x-men uh konami which was like early 90s and then uh I don't know. Final Fight's still my favorite. It has that same satisfaction of when you're juggling enemies and they're bouncing, it's the best.

Is Final Fight the one where you fight the mayor at the end or like the CEO of the company at the top of the tower? Or is that true to Rage? Yeah, that's Final Fight. You're Mayor Mike Haggard and the Mad Gear gang is trying to overthrow the city. And so they've kidnapped Jessica and at the end you go up to the tower and you fight E. Bulger and he's in a wheelchair and at the end you throw him out of the window and he falls and dies. That's so sick.

Game's got to bring that back. So it sounds like Cosmic Invasion is really nailing that arcade feel, that sort of throwback-y style to it. How are the characters? How do they vary? Because I'm looking at the roster here and we've got Captain America, Nova. Everyone loves Nova. Venom. Beta Ray Bill. Sure. Why not? My Silver Surfer. Beta Ray Bill.

Pretty cool character, dude. He's like Thor, but he's like a dinosaur guy. I don't know. I don't know a ton about Marvel. I feel like I do, but more through osmosis and not because I like to read the comics or anything. I'm more of a DC guy. Yeah. How do you feel about the characters, Frank? Is there a lot of variety or is it kind of like four Spider-Men?

and everyone's like Captain America. I like, yeah, because like half the roster are deeper cuts, like even Cosmic Ghost Rider. Like I love Ghost Rider. Cosmic Ghost Rider, I think in the lore is actually Frank Castle, the Punisher, but now he's, I don't know. But he looks really sick and fun to play as. Yeah, I didn't.

know who the hell nova was phy lavel um everyone else i'm familiar with uh yeah she hulk is in here he's really fun to play it was funny there's a does she twerk she no that's not that yeah just the show all right But it was so funny to see on the Steam message board someone complaining like, I don't want She-Hulk. Give me Hulk. Who is this woman crap? Why are they making woke Marvel?

um yeah and so like yeah it's just uh again the pixel art's awesome so like even venom and when you're playing as him it's the same crazy animation of his goop fucking spitting out and going back and he's really big relative to the other characters yes and uh and um uh

oh yeah every character you can swap their palettes so you can have venom be essentially carnage red venom um uh yeah so i don't know it's cool yeah it is weird playing this because it feels like you should be able to swap to megaman or ryu or like it feels like this is like marvel versus capcom beat-em-up that we never got I mean it's only Marvel stuff and even the enemies you're fighting there's Taskmaster I'm trying to think of the other like a lot of times the stages you'll fight like

And you'll fight like Silver Surfer because he's been corrupted. And then you unlock him on your team. I think when you start, you have like six characters. And then as you beat each boss, you unlock them. But yeah, again, I'm not like...

yeah like like the same thing i'm like half versed in marvel like i'm familiar enough with it again a lot of it comes from the 90s games that like capcom was producing um so again playing this game that has throwback arts all of that like even wolverine you can pick the classic like brown and yellow as but you can also swap to the the blue and yellow. Can you give him the flannel so he goes full Canadian?

So there's no there's no like different costumes. I would be sick. Yeah, it's just palette swaps. But yeah, it's it's it's pretty sick. And I think each stage like there's like a there's like a Black Panther level. So you're in Wakanda. There's like Streets of New York generic, you know, every level.

every beat them up is like the first stage is just the streets. Um, yeah, again, it's, I think there's a lot of fun Easter eggs in the background. If you are a Marvel fan or just, there was like, again, I don't know. It was at shield is the, the Avenger core. I don't know. Whatever. Yeah. So it's like, All this stuff is there if you like that stuff. But if you just like 2D fun beat-em-ups, oh my god, this clears the mark.

It's cool to see Marvel going back to that sort of aspect of their games and licensing stuff out to the fighting game aspect of things because Token Souls is still coming out next year. Is it coming out this year? I can't remember. There's a beta soon. Beta soon, but I think the actual is next year. Yeah, maybe even separate, but then Marvel Rivals was earlier this year.

I know, where's that Marvel card game you're obsessed with? I was obsessed with. I got over it, all right? I went to Marvel Snap AA. I got over it, okay? But I do like now that the movie industry had cooled off with the Marvel stuff. Now it's like, oh, wait, we forgot about video games. And now we're getting all these.

incredible video like I mean the fact that we even had the Marvel's Capcom collection this year was a miracle which also MVC 2 was like locked away forever so finally having that yeah on a modern console is nice and then the Punisher beat him up so it's weird that this has been the year of like Marvel's come back to video

video games and like this at the very end like oh crap this is a fun beat-em-up i don't know how many people are going to discover it or play it um yeah it is on game stats i think that includes pc but um Yeah, I just grabbed it on PS5, but I think I had a few friends grab it. And yeah, again, it has cross-play, so anyone can dive in. You can also share room codes if you need to. But yeah, when I play the game, I just open up the lobby, and then random people will join. Or...

I'll browse what lobbies are in and just jump in. And there's been, yeah, no issues. Like it's, I don't know. There's no voice chat or text chat, but the community seems fine. Wicked. Well, there you go. Marvel Cosmic Invasion. How much does it cost?

I think it's 30, but I think it has the Steam, whatever, like first week discount. Yeah, this feels like a game, like if it came out like last console generation, it would have been like, oh, this is like a $20 game. It feels like everything is like a little inflated now, but also like, is that because of the Marvel license?

there's 15 characters so each character who knows how much that is to budget and animate and all right but but the fact that there is a beat-em-up with this many characters is pretty cool and yeah when you see in motion the pixel art is so beautiful and like this is again a studio that like All of their games have definitely shown that love for 2D art. So it's so nice to get this as opposed to like, yeah, I'm like, it sounds weird to say, but it's like, I'm less impressed with like the.

I mean, stuff like Hades is so beautifully illustrated and animated, but to me, video games is like, that's just what I grew up with. So it's like having that crisp pixel art is like, oh, this is what I think a video game is.

For sure, I agree. I think this looks great, too. I'm just flipping through the screenshots here. The backgrounds are amazing. They look so good. This is awesome. Yeah, the character animate. Rocket Raccoon pulls out this gigantic machine gun, as they always do, with a bunch of rocket launchers on it. Yeah, it looks great.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Check it out. Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, probably Switch. It's got to be on everything. Ouya. Why not? Check it out. Yeah. I think this looks like a lot of fun. We're going to do a quick look on it as well. And we're going to bash some bubs or whatever Wolverine says. I don't know.

bub what's going on get him i'm hugh jackman greatest showman jeremy who's your favorite marvel character i know how much you love the uh the franchise beta ray bill baby you just heard about him I was just reading about him while you guys were chatting about it because I need to know a little more. Let me drop a little lore here. Yeah, hit it with it. So Beta Ray Bill, he uses Molinir, Thor's hammer.

And I thought that this was legit. I'm not this is not a bit. I actually think this is cool. The creator of Beta Ray Bill was saying that that like Superman and Captain America can't pick up Molynear because it's like it's a it's a hammer that's like made to smash people to death.

And it's like Superman is like too moral. And Captain America, he's like too moral. And then Captain America can pick up the hammer. He does it in the movie. OK, well, fucking. Why don't you tell that to Walt Simonson? Sorry, you know, maybe watching. Infinity War or Endgame, whichever one it was. He probably said this in like 1983. Yeah, like 77 or something. Oh, no, this was 2010. All right. Well, whatever. Regardless. Fake fan.

I think it's cool that they were like all these like super super bad. He's like too good to do this. And the Beta Ray Bill is like, I'll fucking smash a guy with a hammer. I'll kill him with a hammer. And then they just were like, OK, he deserves the power of Thor. Oh, comic books. They're so strange. They're so strange. Can I quickly talk about the Samogo Legacy Collection? Yes. Before you do, can I have one comic book interjection? Yeah, always.

I was reading about the mask last night, like the comic book that inspired the Jim Carrey movie. The comic is so much darker than the Jim Carrey movie. It's kind of crazy if you read it first and you're like, wait, Jim Carrey plays this guy. It's just like it because in the mask movie, it's like it makes you like wacky and charismatic. And you're like, hey, baby. Somebody stop me. But in the comic, it's just like.

a guy who has grudges against all these people. And then he puts on the mask and he's like, I should kill them all. I did it in the other order. And I was like, when's he going to do the Cuban Pete bit?

Why is he doing that? It's so crazy. I don't know. I just thought that was fucking bizarre. I didn't even know it was a comic until I was reading about it last night. I don't know why I was reading about the mask last night. Sometimes you just get in those rabbit holes. Yeah, I just had to go down a wiki hole. Also, we're reading about Loki or something.

It's snowing outside and I can't dox myself by putting my webcam outside, but it's magical. I could just sit here and chat about video games and fucking watch the snowfall and be delighted forever. Christmas time is here. All right, tell me about Samogo.

Yeah, I will tell you about the Samogo Legacy Collection. Samogo, developers out of Sweden, they make really great video games. They have been since like 2013. They started out making mobile games, including like... Is it Jelly Car? It's in the collection. Let me pull up the names. But they made a ton of really good, like early mobile.

experiments, I would call them. They didn't really pop off until Year Walk. Do you guys know about that game at all? Is it like a mobile game? If you see the picture of the goat, you might know about it. I don't know. It was pretty popular in that space for a while.

Yeah, their original games were like Cosmo Spin, Bumpy Road, Beat Sneak Bandit. I hadn't played any of those. I'm not going to lie. I also didn't play Device 6, which is another game on this list, but Your Walk was the one that I did. And it was this very interesting...

visual deliverance of a story. It was like weird. And it was a lot of reading. There was like books that you read in the game and like a lot of texts. I was like, I don't, you don't do that. I'm playing video games. If you want to read a book, I read a book, but it worked. And it was a solid way to tell that kind of story. I enjoyed it. Talked about a bunch of Swedish...

like folklore stuff, which I thought was really interesting at the time. And they eventually went on to make games like Sayonara, Wild Hearts, and one of my favorite games from the last couple of years, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. That is a fantastic video game and they worked on that as well. And this is their collection. of a bunch of their iPad stuff because all those games are like lost on the platform.

If you want to play some of them, you know, they got to keep updating their games so that they work on the new iPad. Could this work with face ID? If it doesn't, then you can't have it on the iPhone 17. So they were like, you know what? Here you go. You can play them all on your computer or on your Switch 2. And that's what I played this collection on. This was a really...

interesting thing. So like there have been these collections of games. You guys were talking about the Mortal Kombat collection. Frank, you talk about the Marvel collection, all that stuff, but like the ones that are more documentary style, like the Mortal Kombat one.

Those are interesting because it's not just here's the video games. It's also like here's the history, right? Here's some look at the development and everything. And I think that's a really cool way of documenting video games outside of making great documentaries. Patreon.com slash noclip. Nice. But thank you. But this way of doing it is like, so they present it as basically it's an iPad in the video game. So, you know, if you play this on your Switch 2, it's like you have a tablet.

with a tablet inside of it, like a vertical tablet inside of your widescreen. It's so weird. The Switch 2 version of this, I think, is the ultimate way to play it, though, because the tablet interface, you can rotate your Switch 2 and play it like vertical. Or like the long way. They got a Nintendo Switch 2 the long way. And you can look at it that way. And it's like playing on an iPad.

Then these games work perfectly on it. The Switch 2 has multi-touch. So the games that have those features, that's still there. Gyro stuff is still there because it's, you know, it's a Switch 2. It has gyro features. So all of the stuff you would expect from the iPad mobile versions of these games is translated onto that platform.

really well. It feels really good. And I will say this is the first game I have played on switch two, and I've been waiting for something that actually uses the mouse controls and doesn't feel like dog shit. It feels so, and the weirdest thing because it has multi-touch. You use both Joy-Cons. You have two cursors on the screen and both of the Joy-Con independently.

Control one and sorry all of the joy-con 2. I'm so sorry ninta. I'm so sorry Each of them independently control a cursor on the screen if you want to play like with your tablet on TV mode You can even rotate this was the weirdest thing you can rotate the tablet in the game, like the fake virtual tablet to do the gyroscopic stuff. Cause like their early game Cosmo spin is about rotating the, the, the, the interface in the screen. It's like a little.

planet and there's a character running around it. It's like a super simple video game. Um, and you're trying to get your score really high. It's like a very early mobile stuff, but like later on device six, especially, this is the highlight for me is this like narrative book. It's basically just reading. It kind of feels like playing.

The House of Leaves. You have to like rotate the screen and like the letters get all big and spacey. If you were reading a book and you were referring to it as a narrative book experience, that would be very, very funny. Sorry. Guy who only plays video games who reads a book one time. Yeah, it's sort of like a narrative book experience, but it's just a book.

you don't really use the controller much. There's not a lot of buttons. And it's just, it's very, it's like a puzzle game, but all of the bits of the puzzle are revealed as you move the screen around. Like it does this parallax thing where you can see.

puzzle solutions by like manipulating the way you're reading the book in the right order and stuff. There's like audio stuff. You, I think you would really like it, Jared. I think you would really like device six. It's such a weird way of delivering the story. And the story is like actually. sort of labyrinthian in its telling. It's you can reach dead ends in this book, which like outside of choose your own adventure books, I don't think.

You know, that doesn't tend to happen. So it's a pretty cool experience. And the Sailor's Dream also does similar stuff. It's like their later version of that sort of storytelling, but it's like a lot more visually. I would say arresting. I think it looks really, really nice and the puzzles are harder to find.

But yeah, this collection is great. Like, I think all of these games work really well, especially on Switch 2 if you're playing with a double cursor thing. I don't know how it is on PC. I imagine there aren't two mouse cursors. That's not something computers can normally do. But it still, I imagine, works well. I would say get this on Switch if you can. I think it's also on Switch 1.

So you could play it on that as well, but it's not going to have that mouse mode stuff. But the gyroscopic mouse controls still feel really good. I don't know if that's a Switch 2 thing again. If you have a Switch 2, this is like, I feel like you need this. Like, it's great for the arcade stuff. And then there's also... They're like, they have a bunch of prototypes of their other content in here. Like you can play an early version of Bumpy Road. They're like weird.

side-scrolling car game and stuff like that's just cool to see their history if you like the kind of games that they make because they make very esoteric different genre style video games but they're still relatively approachable in most of their design. Like they're weird, but not so weird that you can't get into them. They're just like, it's a little taste of the freak you could get if you played really obscure, small indie games. They're very well produced. They're very polished.

in their weirdness. It's nice. I like Samogo's games a lot. Whatever they're doing next big, I'm going to be their day one. This is a very cool collection, though. If you want to check out their early games, they also have a podcast in there that they made for one of their things. That's just included in there. I think it's a preservation thing. This is awesome. I think is a switch to, you know, system seller.

Hey, why not? For 15 bucks? I think it's on sale right now for 15 bucks. It might launch at 15 bucks. When else are you going to hold your Switch 2 long-wise? Exactly. When are you going to hold your Switch 2 the long way? That's weird. That's like eating a hot dog from the side. You know what I'm saying? That's corn cob in your hot dog? You can't do that. Yeah, exactly. corn cob my dog um yeah so mogul legacy collection it's corn

Corn cobbing my dog. Corn cob your dog with Samogo Legacy Collection. Put that on the box. Yeah, check it out. Device 6, I am going to play more of. I've only played like bits and pieces of all of these. Beat Sneak Bandit was really cool. It's like a side-scrolling... Rhythm platformer. It's very strange. You like tap to the beat to move your little bandit around these like puzzle environments to get to a clock to escape.

I don't, whatever. Uh, it's a fun little weird thing. That's the thing with a lot of the earlier games is like mobile used to be, you could do whatever you wanted. I was thinking while I was playing this, I was like mobile games. You used to just, if it was a circle. that a character walked around, you got a million dollars and they put you on the front of the app store. And now it's like you got a...

You have to sell me a triple A 100 hour long experience that extracts money out of my wallet when I'm not looking, if you want to be on the App Store homepage. So it's weird to look back at that era of games and think like what the requirement was for success.

And how you couldn't do that anymore. Like if you wanted to just start an indie studio and say, yeah, I don't know, we'll make a game where you like drive a car across the screen. That was like, you could, there were hundreds of those. And somehow that started like Zynga, you know, not literally, but like.

That was all it took. And now, even if you make a game like that on Steam, forget about it. You know how many of those launch every day next to, like, you know, a hentai puzzle game or something? You're not pulling it off. That's not a way to start a company.

You got to make like Chinese point and click adventures for moms now. Yeah, that's your choices. Chinese point and click adventure or like you have to make where the winds meet or whatever that game is called. You have to make a big free AAA experience. Chinese game or a different type of Chinese game.

It's the only things you could make. Oh, that's your choices now. You're going to learn Mandarin. You're going to like it. Samoga Legacy Collection. Corn cob your dog and learn Chinese. Corn cob your dog. that's gonna fucking haunt me oh i hope they call the next game core copy dog all right uh that was the yeah some uncle legacy collection check it out it's on uh steam switch switch 2 might be on other consoles probably shouldn't be though just get it on switch

If you don't have a Switch, go steal a Switch and then play on Switch. Let's talk about some older games while we're on the topic of going back to the past to play some games that don't suck ass. Let's talk about Majesty, Jeremy. Tell me about...

your experience of reliving your, your early teens with this RTS game from the past. Oh, way older than that. This game came out. Sorry, I thought this was your early 20s. I wasn't trying to dox your age. You're what? 52? I'm 34. Okay. All right. This game came out in the year 2000 when I was nine years old. What is the prenup?

11 game. That's awesome. It was a it was a America was at its height and I was just on the plane. You didn't have to get scanned or anything. Yeah, this is like your shoes off back in my day. You should drink out. Majesty is a. Yeah, I don't know what possessed me to play this. This is a game that I purchased at the, are you guys familiar with the, holy shit, what's it called? The, oh my God, why can't I think of it? You got this.

book scholastic book fair yes you guys have that yeah yeah so for those of you who did not have the scholastic book fair when i was a kid back in my day uh They would fill the school library like some company presumably called Scholastic would come in with a ton of books and like edutainment software and all sorts of like.

bullshit and just set up like like the whole library would become a store and this is like the most like crass like capitalism in a public school thing I've ever heard of in my life but I loved it And, you know, they would like announce it. It would happen like, I don't know, like a few times a year. It was like less than once a month for sure. And, you know, your parents would be like, here's $20. Get like some fucking Magic Treehouse books or whatever the fuck.

Uh, but, but they, you know, like they, this is when I was playing like fucking Starcraft and shit. And they had, they had video games at the Scholastic book fair. Um, most of them were kind of dog shit, but a few of them were pretty cool. So they had like.

You know, like LucasArts was doing weird edutainment software at the time. There was like the Droid game where you build C-3PO with sexy legs. Droidworks? Droidworks, yes. I think you talked about that, right? Games like that, like things that were sort of...

entertaining and like sort of educational but kind of like not really either uh but for some reason i because like this was an era that i feel like if you're if you're under the age of like 20 it's probably hard for this to this beggar's belief but like all software was seen as educational in some capacity, because if you were a young person, it was like, you got to learn computers because computers is the future. And so it was like.

If you were playing StarCraft, it was like, my boy, he's going to be a computer man someday. It just was the future. He's going to be operating the Scantrons. He knows what he's doing. Yeah, he's going to work. My son plays StarCraft. He's going to work for the government. He's going to work at Oracle. He's going to build those. drones yeah yeah so uh so just like

There were just games at Scholastic Book Fair because it was just like, oh, yeah, like software that's educational vaguely. So Majesty is one of the games that I got at the Scholastic Book Fair. And I bought it because it looked like Age of Empires, which it's not at all. So I was like, oh, cool. Another. like medieval RTS I love this that's like my one of my favorite genres of game but majesty is interesting in that it takes the RTS format and

it spins it in a very orthogonal direction. So in Majesty, it is a kingdom simulator where you build a kingdom in these sort of like standalone instanced scenarios. But the weird thing is, is that there you like hire heroes to be in your kingdom. And there's all these different types of heroes. There's like Captain America, Beta Ray Bill.

There's not that kind of hero, my dear. No, there's like rogues and like rangers. You know, Captain America can't pick up the hammer, right? Sorry, I'm still on this bit. Some of them have hammers. But.

But you don't control any of the heroes. You don't control any characters in this game. None of the units are under your control, which is very interesting because that's like the whole point of an RTS is like, you know, you're micro in this. You've fucking got like control group two is all your Terran Marines. And they're like over here, you know. So there's no micro, it's all macro. Okay.

So you're just building the buildings where you recruit the guys. You're building houses. You're building like stuff to build economy. You're defending your kingdom and building like guard towers and stuff. But you're not you don't actually control anyone. So it creates this very weird experience where it's like.

it's like incredibly frustrating sometimes but when it works it's so fucking good because there's there's this like it's like an ant farm or something it's like a fantasy kingdom ant farm where you can so the way you manipulate these heroes into doing things is um you obviously accrue gold through the economy that you build but you set these flags that are like reward flags and so you can be like all right i'll give

like, I'll give 500 gold to whoever gets here first. And then the heroes, kind of like the way in The Sims, Sims have needs, but the way it actually works in The Sims is that the things that fulfill needs around them are constantly broadcast.

and so there's this sort of like needs hierarchy where it's like oh the sink is right there and it's telling me to wash my hands but I'm not that dirty and the fridge is right here and it's telling me to eat but I am hungry so I'll go to that that's kind of how the needs work in the sims similarly these reward flags are like broadcasting presumably to all these heroes and different heroes have like different so like the the um

the mercenaries are like super greedy so they're always sort of like the first ones to go for the reward even if it's dangerous uh so you're using you're setting rewards as incentive to hopefully like like if the mission is kill like a beholder this giant beholder that's out in the woods once you

see it you put like a $1,500 bounty on it and then all your heroes are who are sufficiently leveled will like go after it but it's fun to just like I don't know there's something cool about it that's just it's I feel like they looked at how popular real-time strategy games were

you know this was like not that long after like warcraft was around and popular and stuff like warcraft the rts was in the height of its sort of popularity at this point age of empires 2 i think came out like a year prior or something um And they were like, what if what if we took this incredibly popular genre and put like a weird game design twist on it? And I think that's really cool because they could have this could have just been like off brand. A.O.E. worse.

Yeah, which is what I thought it was. But the reason I sort of wanted to revisit it is because I think that that's like an interesting game design decision to like. How can we take a familiar genre and invert the thing that is so familiar about it completely opposite? And then like if you were in a studio and you were like, oh, what if we made an RTS but you don't control anyone? I feel like they would like laugh you out of the room.

And I don't know. I think that's so fascinating that it works so fucking well. No, that's great. I feel like that's something that I've kind of been looking for more is games to sort of take an idea and not just like.

put their own coat of paint on it. That's definitely been a problem with the, with the indie space is like vampire survivors, but it's this time it's my brand. Um, I wish they would like do something just a little bit, just spin it in a cool way. And it's, it's neat to hear that they were doing that in the two thousands, but.

less so now it seems strange that's how i feel too like i i not i'm not particularly criticizing megabonk here this is not me being like a megabonk's an example of megabonk hater detected i knew it not not even not even a megabonk hater i But it is interesting as a parallel to see, like, you can pivot from a familiar genre in a direction.

in a different way where like Megabonk is what if vampire survivors, but 3d. And then beyond that, it's like also, you know, it's more bombastic and fast and all these things. Like it has its own identity. It's got boss fights. But yeah, and the boss fights and has sort of more of like a weird, you know, World of Warcraft vampire survivors thing. And I think that's interesting, but it is kind of cool that like pivoted like I often think of.

design, specifically game design, but also just like creative endeavors in general as the shoulders of giants thing where it's like, OK, this thing was cool and popular and revolutionary. How can we push it a little bit further? And I think Majesty is an interesting example that like that doesn't necessarily always have to be. What is the next logical conclusion of the evolution of a genre? It can be like.

what is like the dumbest possible, like most, the least intuitive direction for this genre to develop. Maybe that's interesting. Yeah. Like a gentle remix of the idea as opposed to like, here's the same thing, but we, yeah, it's yellow. What if it was purple? Like it's that it's, it's actually trying to do something different. Yeah. That's very cool. Like what if you ate a hot dog from the side, you know? Yeah. What if you corn cob your dog? Majesty, corn cob your dog.

that was the pitch for majesty but anyway yeah majesty is fucking great um i i i someday i hope that we have uh the budget for noclip 2 to do like weird video essays on retrospective stuff because i would love to i have a whole video essay in my brain about majesty uh patreon.com slash noclip2 um

But anyway, go play Majesty. It's great. It's fucking I don't even know how much I paid for it because I just wanted it. And I was like, it doesn't matter. Is it abandoned where now? Not to suggest people go torrent it, but I mean, it must be on. You can get it for $249 on good old games. There you go. Shout out to GOG. They're really holding it down. Horses and Majesty. That's all I've got there now. And Cyberpunk 2077. There is a Majesty 2 as well, but I've never played it.

Oh, I know paradox published what, like the gold edition of something, something like that of, uh, of majesty, like a decade after it came out. Um, So maybe that version is still available somewhere. I don't even know who made Majesty. You know, like there's like games where it's like, oh yeah, he's the one who gave them the right to have the crown.

No, it's like I feel like there's certain games where it's like who made it is such an important part of its identity in my brain. Like it's like, oh, this was like Microprose made this. Oh, wow. This was actually published by Microprose. Whoa.

i fucking sniped that developed by cyber lore let's just oh that's a good old 2000 game developer name what did they make oh shit okay so cyber lore seems to be a studio that got hired to do like expansions for popular games uh i've clearly i've clearly gone down this rabbit hole before because their entire wikipedia list of games is uh is purple links that i clicked before yeah

But they developed Warcraft 2 Beyond the Dark Portal, which is one of the expansion packs. Heroes of Magic 2, Price of Loyalty, an expansion pack. Oh, Playboy the Mansion. Nice. Yeah, they did Playboy the Mansion, which was their last game, unsurprisingly. Interesting. It seems like they did a lot of getting hired to make other people's weird expansion packs. That's what it used to be. That also used to be a way you could be in the industry. You just added stuff on for a lot of money.

We need to, this is one more important thing I must plant a flag on. Okay. We need to get rid of DLC. We need to bring back expansion packs. We need to get rid of video games. Is it 2010 again? You're just saying the same thing. No, no, but I have an extension to this. Okay. We need to get rid of video games and we need to bring back computer games. Whoa. Okay, now you're speaking my language. And I said that to a friend of mine a few weeks ago, and then I saw someone...

tweet the exact same thing. And I was like, it's in, it's in the fucking, there's electricity in the air. Computer games are back. People over the age of 30 are going to be all over this idea. Old, old fucks like me. All the old heads. Yeah, all the old heads are receiving the transmission from God. We need to bring back computer games as a term. We need to make the computer a thing that like has a throne again. It used to be in a room somewhere. It used to be like a big box that took up space.

It's like a thing you went and prayed to and waited for the DSL line to kick in. You waited for there or whatever it was called. You waited for your mom to get off the phone so you could reconnect to Diablo. Yeah, yeah. Wait for your modem to stop kicking through. I used to have dial up. That's what it was. I had dial up for like way longer than I should. should have. We were, we didn't have a ton of money. Internet was like an extra thing.

Yeah, we go back to that. We got to go back to the computer being a thing that like you go to to play what is effectively an Excel spreadsheet with some graphics on it. All right. Bring back magic. Where's majesty four or three? What are we on now? We never got a three. Well, there you go. You could make it. You could pitch it.

I will make it. The Saudis got a lot of money, man. If you give me one hundred thousand dollars, I will make Majesty three. And will it be good? Yes. Yes, it will. That's pretty cheap, guys. Come on. A hundred grand. And I'll do it in less than five years. There you go. Jeremy Jane, developer of Majesty 3, solo dev. There's Majesty. Check it out. Check out Majesty 2.

Check out other RTS games. Why not? While you're out there. Well, we're not sure on the jury's still out, but it has to be good. Jeremy, let it be good. All right. I don't know if it is. Let the people get excited. Okay. Frank, did you ever buy anything at the Scholastic Book Fair? By the way, that seems like something you would have been into.

Yeah, this I mean, like it's a morbid thing, but it's like I remember at the Scholastic Book Fair, I bought like my dad gave me like ten dollars. And at the Scholastic Book Fair was a little like. I don't know. It was like a Father's Day thing where it was like a little desk thing that said number one dad. So I bought it for him. I remember him being tickled by it. And then...

like almost literally two years ago when I was cleaning out his house in his kitchen, he still had that little number one and it was like rusted and it looked, it looked so scrappy. But the fact that he kept that was like whole, it was such a like.

jesus and then i threw it away because i threw away like 90 of the stuff there that was like that was insane that he had that um other other uh things uh the i think i that's where i got like the um wayside school books there was a louis sacker the guy who did holes he had like a trio of like absurdist novels that like these are kids books but it was like my introduction to like absurdist humor like maybe even like 70s national lampoon-esque but it was like sideways stories from wayside school

And then there was like two more sequels. And I like those books were so funny in like, there were like children's books, but they were genuinely absurd. And like that, that like, I think like taught me a different like lens of humor, even like different than Simpsons or whatever. But like those were, I mean, like.

I think it's so funny, like I don't have any of them now, but you're right. They would have like a Scholastic branding on the books. I think I think like I think at the first Harry Potter, I had like a paperback from the Scholastic Book Fair. I think Scholastic's a publisher, no?

Yeah, and I think they still have a booth at Comic-Con or whatever. But yeah, I'm just trying to think of whatever the popular YA or kids' books in the 90s were. Because yeah, I definitely had a Scholastic brand. You probably had some Goosebumps.

Scholastic brands. Yeah. I never collected good, but like, yeah, every, all the kids, yeah, everyone else. I think sometimes they even sold video game strategy guides or something. They had like card game stuff too. I remember I got the Yu-Gi-Oh! I was so into Yu-Gi-Oh! when I was a kid. Can you tell? I had the Yu-Gi-Oh! like...

The unofficial Yu-Gi-Oh! guy. Here's how all these cards work. Dark Magician girl. Here's what she does. It was great. Yeah, so they had weird stuff like that for sure. Do they have Prima guides? Is that what you're thinking of? I feel like they had like... It was worse. It was like 1001 cheats for Super Nintendo. It was like shitty cheat code books. I always wondered where I got, because I have the blockbuster, 1001 cheats. I feel like half of those books I got at this club.

Scholastic Book Fair. I just went on their website and you can do a 3D tour of a sample Scholastic Book Fair. No, that's what they're doing to us. That's the future. They're selling us our childhood back to us in 3D. You can walk through it. Put on your meta quest. No, no, it's like if you want them to come to your school. Oh, you can see what it would look like if they set it up. But you know what? I don't see a single fucking video game in the whole 360.

degree angle that I'm spinning around and I don't see a single video game. I guess what kids want that they have iPads. What do they need that crap for? Roblox is on there and has infinity video games. That's a good point. Video games were like inaccessible when I was a kid. Like if you would, you would like go to the store and it would be like you would just bask in the glory of Babbage's, you know, and smell the plastic wrap and like.

It was an experience. You said video games in like cereal boxes. Is that a thing? You got it. Yeah, they had like, yeah, I don't think I ever got any, but they definitely did. Oh, like bad crap. Licensed garbage. Point and click. Yeah. Good old days. I don't know. That'd be a good fucking, again, that'd be a good Noclip 2 video. I'd watch that series. Play all the fucking cereal box games. Yeah, that'd be fun. We're getting real nostalgic on this episode. I like it.

That's good. Hey, you know what? Sometimes you got to go back to go forward. True. Truer words have never been spoken. It is the season, too. I get very nostalgic around Christmas time.

holiday season. One more game before we hop into emails. I just want to quickly go over this because I have not played enough of it to give it a strong recommendation, but I do think it's very cool. Scrabdackle. This is like I've never played anything like this before. It's very strange. It's an adventure game where you're playing as a wizard and it's like a top down thing. You have a it's I guess you could say it's a bit like a like a Zelda, like an early Zelda game.

It's like a grid, it's not grid based in that you walk around on the grid, but like you can see where the obvious squares of the pixel art goes. It looks a bit like a Newgrounds style game. I would say it has that like early scratchy flash pixel art look to it. You're playing as a wizard named Blue.

And you have these spells and it's very, it's a very quirky video game. Very quirky. It's very silly. You, the opening cut scene is very quick. You see like, oh, you've been kicked out of school and now you've landed in this magical environment and you have to go around and. pick stuff up and collect things. And like the main interaction ability that you have is you scan or scry everything in the world. So not every single...

thing, but like, you know, it's a bit like Metroid. You see a weird thing, scan it, and then you have this journal you can look in, and it has a... bunch of descriptions. The game has like a ton of words. There's so much writing for a game that looks the way that it does. And the writing I find quite good. It's like funny and it has a good sense of humor. I like it.

And yeah, all the entries are funny or they'll give you like some new information. And basically what you're trying to do in the game is like get back to school and then different things unfold as you're moving around. It's like the more you. explore the world. You like run into these scenarios that don't make any sense and are so strange. I like the random crap. I don't know why. Probably because I grew up with like that sense of humor from the internet.

But you'll like walk into an area. There's like peanut character. They literally they're peanuts with legs and like they talk to you. And the conversation system actually is really cool. When you walk up to a character, you can start talking to them and then like above their head, there's a text box, whatever. But like the.

choices below them you can interact with and then you can just walk away and the conversation will end. And I was like, I don't think there's a lot of games that do that where you just like leave the conversation and not hit the I'm done talking to you button. It's kind of cool.

And they like react to you walking away. They'll be like, all right, I guess we're done talking. Jerk. So that's kind of funny. Yeah, I don't know. So far, I'm really liking the setup of it. I like the tone of it, the music, the sound effects, everything. It's very...

It's very weird. I want someone else to play it because it's like one of those games that if I give away all the fun stuff, it's not as interesting. But I feel like I need to talk to someone about it because it's like it's just so strange. Yeah, it's very...

I like it a lot. Act one is out now. The whole thing isn't out. I think they're planning to put the remaining acts out every year. So next year, act two should be out in the year after act three. But of course, I assume it depends on their sales and everything. I really shit. They're aiming for a 40 to 50 hour range experience for all three acts together. That's crazy. Act one is like very long. There's a lot to it. There's boss fights. There's like, there's this whole.

world that you can warp into. So they're like the game saves with saved spaces. Like you go into a little sigil and stand on it. You can save or you can warp between them and everything. But there's a third option, which is like going to your brain and you dream and like there's different.

versions, like Inside, Inside Out, not Inside, not the Bo Burnham vehicle or the other one. Video game. Yeah. There's a bunch of stuff called Inside. They shouldn't do that. Inside Out, like there's a bunch of personalities within the character Blue's brain that are like, I am Brawny.

blue, but like they're also still really smart and like this headmaster blue. And like, it's kind of, it's very strange. It's very weird, but like it's, it's a cool way of delivering the exposition of the world and like explaining who the character is and everything.

And then you go back out in the world and you talk to like peanut people and they give you a quest or you go into an area and they're like, yeah, I don't know. This world has been destroyed by something. Something showed up one day and now there's clouds and everything's dying. Go save it. Okay, sure. I don't know. It's just, it gives me that same, again, that vibe of like a Newgrounds style game where stuff was just happening.

And it was strange and bizarre. And you kind of just kept playing to see what the next new weird thing was. And I think they've nailed that here. The weird things per second is just off the chart. It's constantly. I entered a new screen and there was there's like these enemies called dust mites. And they're just these little like.

purple balls floating around. There's like a little bit of combat. You, you left click to shoot in the area around you and do these little like wand attacks. It's, it's very simple. The first thing you can do is pick the difficulty mode and just select. I don't care basically. And just like,

The combat doesn't matter. It's just a spectacle. So I'm glad that they have that there because they know it's kind of just, it's not amazing. But I walked into this area with this dust mite thing. So like all these mites were wearing a...

coat and just like talking to you. They're like, can I be wizard? And you're like, no, you can't, you can't just be a wizard. Why? No, it's just stupid. Just stuff like that. I really like it. I think it's very silly and charming. If you like that old new ground style, I think you would enjoy it a lot. Cool. I'm going to pick this up. This looks cool. Yeah, I think it's very neat. Scrab tackle. Check it out. Quick shout out. Like I said, I can't give it a full...

Full-throated recommendation, but I do think what I've played so far of the first, like, two or three hours is very charming, and I'm excited to get back to it once we're done with Game of the Year season, which it sounds like has been extended. So it's time to play more. You guys need to play the 100 line, right?

The 100 line, Last Defense Academy. You guys are going to play that? That's not on the list. 100 line? Which one is this? It's the Danganronpa lead, I believe. Oh, I did see this. Yeah, this is freak stuff. I like that game a lot, but I would not put that on anyone. Just mentioning games. Sorry?

game i said goatee season never ends the games just keep coming out yep we're pushing back the day i thank god because there's fucking a lot of games came out this year that i did not play i played a lot of games this year but there's a lot of games that i did not play i feel like this year we did a lot more um discovery gameplay. At least I did, uh, of like playing stuff that maybe I wasn't excited for, but I did want to try to like properly cover on noclip two or on the podcast or whatever.

And that led to me not playing stuff that would have been on my goatee list most likely if I took the time. So it's just a weird thing to be in, right? Of like playing video games, but not playing the video games. It's strange. Strange job. Strange world we live in. Strange world we live in. What a first world problem. Those are all the games that we played or wanted to talk about this week anyway. Majesty Horses. Play Horses. Or don't. It's up to you. Marvel Cosmic Invasion.

and the Simogo Legacy Collection, and also Scrabdackle. Neat little indie game. Check it out if you like weird stuff. But we do have a lot of emails left. Frank, if you want to read those out for us. Yeah, I was still hungover on Hundred Line. I want to play this, but it's... Oh, we can talk about that. Do you want to talk about the Hundred Line? That's a capital C computer game. It's not coming to consoles. Oh, is it really not on consoles? No.

I guess I could play it on Steam Deck. Yeah, it's great on Steam Deck. It runs really well. I did not realize it wasn't on other console. No, it's also on Nintendo Switch. Oh, really? There you go. I can't imagine what it runs like on Switch. It's pretty performant. It's really cool. It's like that murder mystery kind of thing of Danganronpa, but it's structured like a turn-based strategy game.

But it's not overly challenging. It's sort of like just kill the enemies in the area and then bosses show up. And like the story goes all over the place. And that same sort of Danganronpa flow chart. story thing. It does, it does something like that. There's a lot of, there's literally a hundred endings. That's why it's called a hundred line. Um, that game is long. I hear it's very, very long, but people who love it, love it. And I would put myself among that if I had finished it. So.

It's pretty cool. Okay, no, thank you. Yeah, check it out. Because, like, Duncan Rumpa's sick, but, like, it's cool, but I haven't played much of it. It's a visual novel, but, like, this has game, like, there's combat. There's a lot of reading. But the voice acting is funny. You would, there's one character I would love to know your thoughts on if you get around to it. Who's like, she sucks.

She's so silly and over the top. But she's into murder. She's like, I want everyone to die. I would love to know what you think about her when you get to it. So when you get to it, let me know. Yeah, dang. Oh, my God. Dang and Rampa. Oh, my. Okay. All right. Yeah. All right. Well.

Yeah, okay, okay. What do you want to know? It sounds like you want to keep talking about it. No, I know, but again, there's too many games and they're all $60. True. That's the worst part. You just got to wait until they're forgotten about. That's all right.

Okay, cool, cool. There's another game that came up on. I was just clicking the publisher by Aniplex, and there's a game called Hookah Haze. Oh, that sounds sick. Which is about a hookah lounge on the outskirts of Akihabara. Dude, it actually is. That's awesome.

See, this is a game I want to play. Wow. The art style here is so frank. Oh, my God. That's what I'm like. It's only $10. So that's that's a real. Anyway. Yeah. I'll check a hookah haze. I'm now I'm in a hookah haze talking about what they call it. It's. I forget. I have a friend that goes to all these. They're not called hookah in Tokyo. It's like shiri. It's a different term.

I don't know. It's a whole subculture, whatever. Okay. Let's get into emails. Um, we already talked about Catherine's email about horses. Thank you. Right again. Yeah, we, we covered it. Um, again, if horses was on console, Hey, I'd play it. If I get trophies. Um, all right. If you want to send us emails, please write to us podcast at noclip.video or on our Patreon channel, the podcast chat channel in our Discord. But once again, podcast at noclip.video if you want to send us an email.

Casey wrote in and asked, does playing the same game on three different platforms change the experience of that game? Hi, folks. I've been thinking about how different platforms for video games change the context around games that are played on them. For example, I expect my PS5 to be the place where I play huge, gigafuck, triple-A cinematic games and the Steam Deck to be the place where I play cool indies that have less than 200 reviews.

Another example is, I find playing older games that were designed for specific hardware on newer hardware to be a really disconnected experience. So my question is, does the platform that a game is played on affect your perception of that game? 100%. Yes. Absolutely. This is Marshall McLuhan, never talked about video games, but his whole medium is the message. Hell yeah.

Yeah, no, this extends to things beyond video games, too. I think a lot about this with with music hardware that like the people who are like big hardware heads in like the music production scene. It's it's like.

It's not just that hardware sounds better. Like, for example, synthesizers. This is not that hard synths inherently sound better than digital synths and VSTs, though they often do. But I feel like this sort of thing that fewer people talk about is that having a dedicated device for a task is like... it puts you in the fucking zone. And like the, we have associations with devices that this device is for this. I'm like holding this device. It's time for me to do this.

I think about this all the time with game dev because I wish I had if I was rich, I would buy a second computer that I'm only allowed to do game dev on because I do so much chilling on my fucking computer. And it's like. Sometimes I do game dev and I'm just like slip into chilling. And it's like, I need like a game dev terminal. You know what I mean? You got to look away from the bad screen to look at the good screen. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But yeah, no, the device on which you play a game.

super matters i think it uh it shapes your expectation i think and i don't even i think it's totally personal too i think different people have different associations with different uh different hardware but you know like old fucking like retro game enthusiasts uh talk about this all the time with uh

You know, it's it's playing a game on a Super Nintendo is a different experience than emulating the exact same game. And it's not just about like frame rate or like running it through like a CRT and stuff. It's also just like the experience, the tactility and the cognitive framing.

Yes, absolutely. It's like I was joking a little bit about that. You need to put the computer back in a throne room. But no, like there is something about that being the place where you go to do a thing being an important part of doing the thing. Like when I read a book.

I'm always like, I got to structure it in a certain way. I want it to be in a specific environment. It means I don't read a ton, but when I do, I get a lot out of it because I can really give it my full attention and have a space and let it be just for reading. It's like, you know, if you want to...

solve your sleep, you got to make sure that your bed is only for sleeping and not also for scrolling and playing games and whatever. Um, that's just a weird cognitive thing for sure. And I also think like the device that you play a game on. I think you should try to play it on whatever it was made for, but also, you know, SNES RPGs to me work a lot better on like a mobile handheld device because then you can sort of put it down.

whatever you feel like you don't have to do. It's a different way of playing it, but I like them more that way because I treat them more like a book where you can like play enough of it, put it down, do a chapter, whatever. as opposed to like needing to own the living room. I'm going to do this combat. Mom, please don't turn it off. I know Judge Judy's coming on. I want to just let me get past this guy. I got to beat Gilgamesh. Give me a second. So there is that part of it too.

Yeah, Frank, do you have like a specific ritual for playing games? Is there anything here that you can relate to? Yeah, I mean, it's so funny talking about like playing a Super Nintendo RPG because the first time I played Chrono Trigger and like beat it was on the Nintendo DS because I think I... I think I was just in bed for like a week and I was like, you know, I'm just gonna play Chrono Trigger. And yeah, the clamshell opening and closing it.

yeah like when you get pissed you're just like slam it shut we can't do that with my ps5 it's not the same no but i mean that's why i rarely play computer games because for me like i from now these days it's like if i'm playing a computer game it's literally just to record gameplay capture for noclip stuff like i don't like

So the idea of like buying a Steam game to sit and play for pleasure is like, oh, no, like this is where I do work is here. This is so dumb. But when I'm playing video games, I rotate 90 degrees and I look at my console. It works. But no, but then I'm sitting back and I'm relaxing. Whereas if I'm like recording stuff, I'm. you know, in the zone or whatever, but, um,

But even then, like PS5 is like, oh, these are the games I actually care about. I want to get the trophies on. I'll go on PSN profiles where everything has a breakdown. Xbox is like my like like my the shitty second tier console. where all the games are super cheap. They're on Game Pass, so I don't care as much. It's like, that is like, I'm just gonna mess around. What's going on over here? And then the Switch, I was so dismissive of, but now the Switch 2, like, with like the, like...

Even like DK Bonanza, I'm like, oh, this is so good, but it feels wrong I'm enjoying a Nintendo console. It's like, I've talked so much shit on Nintendo for like two decades. But again, I play it on my TV. I'm not... playing my switch on the go, unless I'm like on a flight to Japan or whatever, or Oregon or whatever, then I'll use it. But like, yeah, I have, I have like, um, weird, honestly, like prejudices are weird associations per console. Um, and I'm trying to think what I like.

I don't know. Yeah. So controller is a huge factor. I'm even thinking of like my PS3, the controllers on PS3 are so shitty, but there's some games that are only on PS3. So like. Yeah, it's also the ritual. Yeah, if you are playing a Super Nintendo on a CRT, it's like, oh my God, you're transporting back in time. And I think even Casey's original subject is, does playing the same game on three different platforms change the experience of that game?

I can think of, like, Tony Hawk 2. You can play it on PlayStation, the enhanced version on Dreamcast. Everything is, like, different loading speeds, different controllers, different, like, or you can play Tony Hawk 2 on the remaster on PS4, and each thing is a different experience. My definition of Tony Hawk 2 is playing it on Dreamcast because that was the version I played the most. But everyone has a different experience. Yeah, I don't know. So it's...

I think like for me, the core is like, yeah, play whatever is easiest. So for me, the game is remastered and is available to play on PS5. That is my like A. But then if it's on Game Pass, oh, I'll play it on Xbox. If we're going to record it for like a documentary, then okay, here's the Steam version I'm playing. just for work but I'm not going to enjoy it on my personal time on the computer but everyone has their own specifics but yeah I think like that's why again the whole

Like it's, it's, I don't know. I don't think, I don't see it anymore. But like back in the day, the console wars of like, I have GameCube, I have Xbox. Like we're all, we're all kids. How many bits does your console have? Mine is 64.

yeah gee i don't know it was it was so weird so yeah now i feel like there's way less uh i don't know platform elitism i don't know but now then it's like yeah where are you buying your games you can't play horses on steam so i'm never gonna play it but uh no i don't know i don't know

But yeah, it's I've honestly even talking about like store launchers. There's a new game my friends are playing. I can't remember, but they called it like it's the anime waifu version of like Slay the Spire. But it's like like like Nikkei, all these like. these games aren't on Steam, so I'm not going to play them. You have to download an independent launcher, but I'm going to never think of that. If it's on console, I'll play it.

There is a convenience factor that I think is sort of automatically included in this conversation. It's like as much as there is something that you get out of, it's sort of like a primordial... factor of it, but like something you get out of playing a game on a specific console.

I don't have a ton of time. I'm not, you know, do I want to set that up? I got to plug in the cables and then I got to do all this other stuff. But there is like when you go to a console and you put a disc into it and close the disc tray, it's like.

There's something to that that makes it feel more important. Like I have a what do you call it? The handheld boutique analog pocket. I have one of those and I have a ton of games loaded on the SD card on it. Right. Playing them on the SD card. I don't.

care about them at all. I'm like, I'll stop playing this because I didn't buy it. But when you put the cartridge in now, all of a sudden I'm invested in it, not just monetarily, but also like it has a physical space that I can look at and be like, that's.

my game that I'm playing right now. It's Minish Cap. I need to put it into the thing to play it. So there is that part of it. But for sure, I totally agree that like the convenience part of it is a big element of whether or not I'm going to play maybe more esoteric stuff, like weirder things. I feel like the...

the like what you're describing is something that I feel like humanity is like coming around to but it's it's funny because it's something that I feel like we all deny and I'm I am so guilty of this where like I would hear about people who are like oh I You know, like when when working from home became sort of the norm for everyone for a while and for some people still is. It was like.

people were like, oh yeah, I gotta, I need like that separation. Like I need, I gotta, I can't like work in my bedroom. I need like a separate space for it. And I was definitely someone who was like, fuck that. Like I just fucking roll out of bed. I hop on my computer. Like that's awesome. I don't even need to like go to a different place. That's how you get.

depression everything's on the same the last place i lived had like another i had like a little tiny nook in the corner where my computer was and uh and having like a separate space that wasn't my bedroom all of a sudden it was like It wasn't so much that it felt different when I went into that space. It was when I left there that like my room felt different. And I was like, oh, this is weird. Like, because.

I it's weird because you don't, I don't want to like believe it's true. I want to believe that I'm like, I am like a sentient human being. Like my brain is like one of the most, the most amazing things in the cosmos is like a fucking human brain. I could just. tell myself that it's OK, but it's like there's some level where like you don't have control over it. And I feel like it's like I tell myself the same thing about emulation where it's like.

you know oh i could just emulate that game like i when i'm playing it i don't know that it's not like silent hill 4 on like a disc but it's like you kind of you just do like yeah i don't know i was like in part of playing those games is hearing the disc drive chug

Or like the optical like reader chug as it's loading something. There is a part of games that like, I'm sure it's just nostalgia if we're being totally honest about it, but like that there is that part of it that I think feeds into the.

the aspect of play, like when a horror game, when you can hear the disc drive whiz up, cause it's loading a character and you know, something's about to happen. Yeah. That is part of it that you lose by emulating it. I think it's also like, um, it's just like ritual and, and like rhyming.

it's putting on a record just the extra bit of friction it takes to like pick up the thing and like have tactility where you hold it and like take it out switch if it's a little like ep you gotta switch the thing or lp yeah yeah you gotta switch the rp and get the right size yeah um or you gotta listen to it it sounds like chipmunks and you're like this sounds like um

Yeah. I don't know. There's something ritual is, is important no matter how much you like myself are in denial about it. It sucks when the Instagram influencers tell you that like getting eight hours of sleep, drinking water and like going for a walk every day will, will help you. And you're like, no. Yeah.

It is like how I hate when I exercise. I'm like, oh, fuck. I feel better. This sucks. I fucking hate how great I do. All those guys were telling me, man. I thought they were just trying to sell me supplements, but they were actually giving me good advice. I hate this. It sucks. Next email, Frank. Yeah.

Casey wrote in. I think they had two emails. Their second email, they're asking... Hi, folks. I want to get more into reading, but there's just so many books. And while I've read a few books over the last few years, I feel like I don't read enough or as much as I want to. So I'm going to give you my top five games. And I'm wondering, based on these games, what books would you recommend?

My favorite games, Alan Wake 2, Citizen Sleeper, Hades, Red Dead 2, and Silent Hill 2. Wow. That's a killer top five. I'm going to say Cat in the Hat. would be a good he knows a lot about that uh no it's uh yeah you guys have any book recommendations that would work for this well my core is alan wake is so well maybe less the second one but the first one is so steven so steven king i feel like you need to dive into steven king and it was the same recommendation game Jesse, which is like...

It is like, obviously, oh yeah, you got to read It, but it's so intimidating because it's like a thousand pages. Skeleton Crew is the prime, like, okay, that was my first Stephen King, and there's like 16 short stories. There is a great sci-fi one in there, The Jaunt. You can read The Mist novella. It's in here. It's the opening.

also inspired half-life so yeah i think stephen king like alan wake is so stephen king um even like the dark realism like that's my favorite thing from stephen king is like dark realism where it's like fucked up fantastical shit happens and it's like

you're dead. It's like, not like, Oh, Harry Potter took a scar. Now he used, he drank potatium, whatever. It's like, no, this, this, this crab creature bit my leg and now I have a gangrene. I'm dead. Like, it's like, it's so cruel and mean, but I love Stephen King. Yeah, I don't know. But that was my gut. I don't know if you guys have other suggestions. That's a great pick. Off of Silent Hill 2, it's definitely not a one-to-one pairing.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, I think is a good sort of like, I don't know. It's definitely like a little more antique feeling. It's more like, you know, it's like 1950s Gothic literature. It's not quite as like. 2000s horror core with an emotional uh backbone or whatever but um i feel like it kind of hits the same sort of like emotional horror notes yeah that sounds right um good book

Citizen Sleeper, if you really like that, like, I don't know about poetic sci-fi necessarily, but if you like that, that found family sci-fi stuff or just like a group of people doing something that feels, you know, cosmologically impossible. You might like the Southern Reach trilogy.

Really, really good books. I started reading those after the Ambrosia Sky preview, or, well, feature that I did with the team there. They were talking about that game, or the book series, rather. Quite good. I think that's the... Is that Rival? No, it's not Arrival. It's...

Annihilation. Yeah, I had to look at it. I was like, oh, yeah, I had a friend also like obsessed with those. And I love the movie Annihilation. It kept going. But yeah, yeah, I've heard Annihilation. The first book is a really great taster because it's like very short and focused on the character dynamics and their relationship. It moves incredibly. quickly though. So like, you know, get ready for a pace monster. It just flies through.

Yeah, if you like Citizen Sleeper, Ted Chiang, also I recommend checking out. Story of My Life, I think, is The Origins of Arrival. That's the mix-up that I had there. Really, really good. And I started reading Tchaikovsky's Shroud. Very, like, dense.

And it's sci-fi stuff. But like there's there's things going on in that where you're like, oh, the capitalism has just been doing the same thing since forever. Nothing to society ever changed at all. Was it just like this in the 70s? And we just wrote sci-fi stories and. Has anything improved in 50 years? Is that a book about the famous FPS competitive esports player? It is. Yeah. You nailed it. I can't believe Tchaikovsky saw this coming.

What about Red Dead Redemption 2? Blood Meridian. I was going to say. I hate to make that comparison. I hate to make that comparison for two reasons. One, it is one of the most like. recommended books in the universe and two i think the writing in red dead i'm sorry i gotta say it i think the the narrative craft in red dead redemption 2 is kind of dog shit did you finish it

Yes, I did. Okay, no, I'm not asking that to be like, you would have liked it if you got to the end. No, no, no. I just wanted to say so you understand what I'm saying. The back half of that game, I think, is so much better than the front half of that game. Like, for Arthur's specific character arc.

Yeah, I could see that. I yeah, I'm not saying it's like top tier, but I thought it got a lot better. The closer I will. I'm going to say this. And this is one of the most derogatory things I can say. It's a it is a TV show story. And I mean that as a critical insult. Yeah, it's too. I get what you mean. It's needs. It's not. It's not. It's there's a lot of.

It's like someone poured me a glass of orange juice and then they just were like, took some water and they just kept pouring and pouring the water. And I was like, I just want the orange juice. No, wait, this doesn't taste like anything anymore. What if it was watered down? But you get so much orange juice.

Yeah. What if you could drink this for 20 years? Anyway, no, that's I, you know, you would have liked it more if you played it exactly the way I did. It had exactly my tastes. Why are you disagreeing with me? I sat down and I played the entire thing in a week and did nothing else. And you're supposed to take a whole year to play it. Then you would have liked it. It's not a bad game. I just hated the story. Right. You just think it should like rot.

And Rockstar should never make another game. It's not bad. I just think it's dog shit. No, it's not that bad. I just didn't personally connect with it. But Blood Meridian is, you know. So you're saying it's the Red Dev Redemption 2 of books is what you're saying. Oh, God. quarterback mccarthy will fucking come back from the dead and kill me are there any other like good uh cowboy books

I just started reading Steel Ball Run. It's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, like seventh series of it. But I didn't know. I just picked it up because like it's forthcoming. The anime is coming out next year. But like. JoJo is so huge in Japan, but the thing that's unique about Steel Ball Run...

is it's a Western that starts in San Diego. The premise of Steel Ball Run is it's a horse race from San Diego to New York. So it's like, oh, and the winner gets $50,000. So it's just like it starts with this incredible hook. But yeah, it's like the guy that like.

every Jojo volume is a different setting. Like the first one's like vampires and there's like, I don't know, but, but I didn't know like, Oh, this is, I've been craving a Western. Um, and I think cause I, I love like stuff like red dead and stuff, but it's like, I need a different flavor or whatever. And, uh, yeah, I started reading steel ball run. And it opens up. Oh, I don't have it. I think it went back to the library. But it opens up and it's like, oh, the year is 1890. Like...

They just establish everything. It's like, oh, this is what the book's going to be about. Oh, my God. And yeah, it's just it's just horse races and scoundrels and natives and like. everyone's competing for this $50,000 prize. And it's like, oh my God, this is so sick. So I have volume two, I think is on route from Amazon right now. But yeah, I recommend like, if you're trying to build a reading habit.

You can devour comics and manga so easily, but then that will start associating you with like fun times reading and then you can crack into novels and stuff. But yeah, I don't know. Steel Ball Run is just volume one was phenomenal. And then Citizen Sleeper made me think it's different. flavor because it's more fantasy but like you might like reading saga because i feel like citizen sleeper has such a wild art palette and that's what saga is it's just like crazy beautiful colors and uh

Yeah, like, I don't know, the stories are. Saga is a really good pull, actually. It has that like found family aspect to it. It's got like a ton of characters like go away and die very quickly. Like next page. I hope you didn't like that guy because he's gone now. Very sad as well. Like they're one of those volumes ends with just like.

the saddest 15 pages and literally nothing happens yeah there's like um they took a long hiatus and i feel like i don't know if it was like right before that i mean there's like every volume has like stuff happens but i remember there's like one huge shocking thing and it's like Are we back in like four years? Yeah. But now it's back. And I have like piles of issues saved up. And again, Brian cave on Canadian. Yep. But yeah. And then.

with Sun Hill 2 different flavor too but like if you haven't read any Junji Ito that is so easy to digest and swallow and like silly it's Junji Ito stuff is like to me funny first it's not even in like a uh, it's like, they're generally murder funny. No, they're very silly. It's like so stupid and funny. It's like, so I don't know. Check out. Yeah. But, um, do you have any specific, uh, ito recommendations? It was a Maki probably.

I think I read, yeah, I read Spiral first and then like I did like Tomi. Tomi is rough to recommend because like there's the first chapters like he's writing that when he's like 17, like he's a kid. So it's like super scratchy. So it's not like the best place. to start but yeah spiral is fine but I like his short story uh collections and like god I I feel like you can't I mean some are definitely duds but like

I don't know. Honestly, go to the library. If there's any Junji Ito, just pull there. But I think it has such a mass. Just know that's all very hit or miss, but it's always like funny and cool. Yeah. Junji Ito is like. I've I've when I heard about his work before I actually read any of it myself I thought it was very sort of like serious grim dark horror but it's more like um

It's kind of like if if HP Lovecraft was Japanese and had a good sense of humor sometimes, you know what I mean? Like it's like not the other stuff. None of the like weird racism or like any of that bullshit. No, I just it's like, I don't know. There's. Junji Ito will surprise me where it's like the most grim story ever about like being entombed alive in like a Buddhist mausoleum and then the next one will be like what if like a shark

could walk on the land and he was in your house. It's like, I mean, what if? What if a guy filled up with air and flew away? Like, okay. I guess that'd be cool. Yeah. Show me that. Very weird. Very weird books. If I could make one more recommendation. I know this is probably, if you like sci-fi, this is a bit like saying, you know, read Cat in the Hat. But just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It's a really good book. Philip K. Dick, everything. Dick goes crazy.

Read Valis. Valis. Dick goes crazy. Yeah, no. I like Philip K. Dick. I used to live right by his house in Berkeley. Oh, that's so cool. He didn't live there. Well, he was probably dead. No, I guess not. Yeah, Philip K. Dick is the man. Are there any Clark? Arthur C. Clark?

I have not really read. I've read more Asimov than that older sci-fi, that like group of like six to 10 guys. They were, you know what? They're lauded for a reason, man. They were really good books. They were cooking. Yeah. There's a lot of novels from that era that are just like. A guy is working at the SETI telescope and they're getting messages and it's like aliens. But then the whole book is just like a guy being like.

what should we what's the first thing we should say to the aliens and it's like 350 pages about like what you would say to aliens and the aliens never show up and it's just like damn this is just like this is just like philosophy

There's kind of there's no like, oh, like it's the midpoint. The aliens get off the ship. It's just like, oh, well, perhaps we should show them Chopin. I don't know if that would make the right impression, though, because the modal movement is a little different than they. I don't know. It's like it's so fucking weird.

thinky yeah very like techno babble but still being like grounded in reality yeah you'd be like the smartest guy ever to write sci-fi in like the 50s yeah or at least you had to pretend to be the smartest guy ever no don't sit come on 2001 a space odyssey Brave New World. He was cooking, alright? There's a reason all the good movies were based on that stuff.

My personal favorite, it's fucking, it's cliche, but my favorite sci-fi shit back in the day was just like all of the fucking dystopian sci-fi like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and half of Aldous Huxley's books. Yes, yeah. I don't know. There's something very evocative about just like, here's what if the world was like fucked up in this very specific way? And here's a guy who lives there. Yeah. Very cool stuff. They were really they were living on the edge.

Back then with the sci-fi. There's a lot of book recommendations, Casey. I hope one of those got you excited. I think they're all good recommendations, though. All those books are very good. One more email here, Frank, from Bruno.

Yeah, Bruno wrote in and said, hi, y'all. I was listening to episode 254 and Jesse gushing about Saktori compelled me to ask if you guys ever played my favorite twin six shooter, Assault Android Cactus. It's not only one of my favorite games.

But the best Dreamcast game ever released this side of the 21st century. I feel like the game doesn't get enough proper recognition it deserves, so I want to at least tell you guys about it. Yeah, Salt Android Cactus is... I have not played it myself, but we did have to... I got my buddy to get footage for...

I think we did a video on unpacking that indie game on what was Noclip Crew at the time. Yeah, I guess the same developers is unpacking, which is like, really? All right. At least the programmer. Yeah. It's, have you guys seen this game at all? I bought it whenever it came out. I never played it, but it's in my library. Yeah, it feels like one of those Steam games that just everyone owns.

for some reason. It looks really good, though. Yeah, my buddy said it was really fun, so maybe I should have listened to him and played it three years ago when he played it and said it was good. Yeah, lots of good arcade shooters recently. In the last couple of years, it feels like Blast Rush LS. I'm having a hard time with my S's and H's. That was pretty cool. Turning into Sean Connery slowly. Rush, Rush.

We're playing Star of Providence. Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys have any love for the twin stick shooter era? Were you big on the shooting a lot of little enemies with two sticks? I like them when I play them. It's not really a genre that I've played. that much of yeah you got a big uh you finally get good at birdcage we can record that uh quick look or indie rec not that good oh we're gonna find out as good enough i might need a few warm-up runs all right i can't wait to see

You might have to listen to me make the same joke three times because I'm like, let's run it back, run it back. You know what? I'll think it's funny every time. Don't worry about it. I got you. Good. Thanks, man. Frank, any left room? No.

Yeah, no, I love Geometry Wars. Again, I bounced off by the time the third one came out. But yeah, 1 and 2 I was obsessed with. And even as a kid, like... um you know go to the arcade playing Robotron and like all not like I wasn't in the 80s but like back as a kid Robotron was the free machine like all that crap and stuff like that so it's like

Yeah, like Smash TV. I love Smash TV. The game I was trying to think of is, I think it's called Cannon Spike. Maybe this is straight up what it's pulling from, but Cannon Spike is a Capcom Dreamcast game that is... Basically the same. It's a twin stick shooter, but you're playing as like Mega Man, Cammy, Charlie. Oh, yeah, dude, that's Cammy from Street Fighter 1. It's crazy. It's so sick. Isn't that her move? Oh, yeah. Cannon and Spike. Cannon and Spike, yeah. All right. Yeah, it's a bizarre.

It's such a bizarre game. But again, it's so much style. And yeah, I feel like maybe they looked at it. Yeah, I'm trying to, yeah. I mean, technically even GTA is like a twin stick. The old ones, yeah, kind of. Yeah, yeah, top down, shoot around, you know, you get the rampage mode and you get the machine gun and you just spin around as the cops run at you. And that was my twin stick shooter.

I never thought of that. That's so true, though. Very funny. Yeah, weird genre of games. It's cool that it's kind of, there's nostalgia for it, though. The ones that I've spent the most time are probably when that genre got merged with roguelikes, like Nuclear Throne, Isaac.

Enter the Gungeon. Those are probably. Enter the Gungeon is awesome. Gungeon is really good. I really like that game. It's really fun. Kicking over tables, shooting past them and stuff. Yeah, it's a good time. They should make another one of those or something else. They should just make something else. Actually, don't make another one. We already have that.

Yeah. Thanks for all the emails, folks. Great questions this week, especially the horses one that we covered right at the top. We don't normally do that, but I didn't want to I didn't want you to have to wait an hour, Casey, to hear our thoughts between the game and whether or not Valve should be allowed to ban video games. So very cool. Very cool conversation. Yeah, that's the pod this week. Lots of stuff going on on the Noclip side. It's just whether or not we have the time.

to put it all together for the end of the year. No clue what's going to happen with Game of the Year stuff. It's really all up in the air regarding Danny and his family and everything that he's dealing with back home. So it's really, we can't make any dedicated calls on it, but we are still plugging away at all of our Game of the Year stuff. We have like...

55 games in there. It may end up being 60 by the end. I'm sure something will come up where we're all like, guys, you need to play routine. I don't know. It just came out today. None of us have played it. I'm sure it's good. It took 13 years, which means it has to be good, right? The longer it takes, the better it is.

So we'll see what's going on with all that. But in terms of stuff that's available now, Disco Elysium episode one is still live on our channel, has not been removed yet. They have not banned us for including anything positive about Estonia. Episode two is live on Patreon, but the public version as of recording is.

potentially going to come out on Monday. At the very least, it will be out soon-ish. It is basically like 99% done. Danny just needs to finish it up. We have some more quick looks coming out and indie recommendations. Like I said, we're going to do one on Marvel Cosmic Invasion and Birdcage as well. And we have all...

the other ones that we put up. No Caps has that new video about demos, which is pretty cool, and Leeloo, that new game, or the demo for that game, rather. So lots of cool stuff still coming out. Our Movie documentary documentary. We're not doing any movie documentaries. Our movie podcast that we're supposed to do for Advent Children has been pushed back. So you can see that either end of this month or that'll be the January episode. Regardless, it will be coming eventually.

So I think that will be fun because I haven't seen that. Frank, you haven't seen that either. So it'll be a first time. It'll be a blind recording for our thoughts on on Advent Children. So, yeah, lots of stuff coming down the no clip pipes that you should still be excited for. And you can support all that work.

at patreon.com slash noclip. Get all the behind the scenes stuff, get access to documentaries early. You can watch episode two and then probably episode three of the Disco Elysium documentary. I don't want to make any promises on that, but maybe episode three of the Disco Elysium documentary.

Early, potentially. Not right now, as of recording, but eventually. Yeah, lots of stuff coming down the pipes. Guys, anything you're excited for from the no-clip space? No spoilers? Don't bring anything up that we're not allowed to. No, there's some good games coming out. Angeline Era comes out December 8th. So I'm honestly, even though the circumstances are not ideal and sad and tragic, an emergency situation came up. It is the silver lining of it is that if Goaty gets pushed back, you know.

It's like, I mean, it's always kind of the downside of doing Goaty is that like we like to do it at the end of the year because it's sort of this like big way to cap off the year. We talk about all the games of the year as the year is ending for us. But then, you know, there's always the perspective that it's like a lot of good games come out in December.

and those get shafted. So ultimately, I'm kind of glad we got a little extra time to spend with all of these games and also just keep an eye on what's coming out the rest of the year. So Goaty may be delayed, but I think it will be bigger and better when it does happen.

Agreed. Yeah. And the reaction has been, I think, very positive. People are, of course, very supportive of Danny needing to do what he has to do with his family and take care of all that. And everyone understands. Could you imagine if everyone was like, no, don't take care of your family. How dare you? I want my content. But.

I do think the reaction of like, it's okay, push Goaty to next year has been interesting to see. I feel like there's this ingrained feeling that like game of the year, you got to do it around the sales. You got to do it around the Keelys. You got to make sure you line it up at the end of the year, but. I think people just want to hear our thoughts and if we can be more comprehensive and cover December games, I feel like that's probably a positive more than it is a negative.

i had this uh you know when you're falling asleep and like a weird like scene plays out in your head like a movie and you're just kind of like you're just it's not like a dream like you're awake but you're kind of just like ideas are happening you're like oh that's pretty that's pretty funny but like it doesn't feel like you came up with it uh

in my head i was imagining the scene from taxi driver where travis bickle is driving around the streets like looking at it he was like like animals come out at night but it's just me watching all the trailers at the game awards Um, and just like, it's that monologue decrying the, like the moral decay of the world. Uh, but it's just, it cuts between Travis Bickle in his cab looking like disgusted. And then it just cuts to like the 700th dark souls ripoff. Hey, come on.

I mean, I love Dark Souls. 705th. Anyway. Get the count right. You talking to me? Yeah, it's not monologue, but it's just me watching the Game Awards, pointing a gun at my computer. Keeley's like, you're going to love this, and you're like, you talking to me?

Are you announcing that game to me? Nobody else here. So you must be talking to me. You know who we're talking to you right now, but not any longer because this podcast is over. Thank you for listening. It's been episode 256. We'll see you next week for something. Might be Goaty, might not be. I don't know. You'll find out. It's going to be good. It's going to be good. No matter what, it's going to be good. Go home. Corn cob your dogs. We'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.